Episode 02: Just Like a White-Winged Dove: Birds ft. Dr. Dan Baldassarre
This episode, I'm chatting it up with Dr. Dan Baldassarre, an expert in the behavioral ecology of birds. We discuss the fascinating world of birds, including their adaptations, courtship behaviors, and vocalizations. We also explore the connection between birds and dinosaurs, as well as the cultural and societal influences on bird behavior. From the complex songs of songbirds to the unique courtship displays of fairy wrens, birds offer a diverse and captivating subject of study. This episode provides a glimpse into the intriguing world of avian behavior and the wonders of the natural world. Most importantly, we talk about conservation efforts to protect bird species and how individuals can contribute to their preservation.
ABOUT OUR GUEST
Dr. Dan Baldassarre
Daniel Baldassarre is an Assistant Professor and Provost Teaching Fellow at SUNY Oswego, where he teaches classes on ornithology, evolution, and animal behavior. With a team of undergraduate researchers, he studies the behavioral ecology of Northern Cardinals and plumage coloration of various species. He also operates the Rice Creek Bird Observatory banding station in Oswego, New York. You can find him on Twitter as @evornithology and on his website danbaldassarre.weebly.com.
Website: https://danbaldassarre.weebly.com/
Twitter: @evornithology
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Check out the book Ducks, Geese, and Swans of North America by Dr. Guy Baldassarre https://amzn.to/49QJIR9
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Dr. Raven Baxter (00:24):
Hi everyone. It's me, Dr. Raven Baxter, and I am sitting in Chicago. I have found an Oasis, which is a soundproof booth in the middle of happy hour in the middle of downtown Chicago during the weekday. I apologize for any noise in the background. This is literally the best I can do. Today we have the pleasure of talking with Dr. Dan Baldessare. Dan’s at SUNY Oswego in New York. He studies the behavioral ecology of Northern Cardinals and how they're affected by urbanization. Cardinals are excellent urban adapters and they make use of bird feeders and habitat modification by humans. His research explores behavioral changes in response to urbanization and how this behavioral flexibility can allow Cardinals to be so successful in human dominated landscapes. His research involves regional field work around Oswego in New York and lab work, all led by SUNY Oswego undergraduates. Him and his students also operate the Rice Creek Bird Observatory banding station.
(01:32)
He also works with collaborators all over the world to use reflectance spectrometry to analyze avian plumage color variation. Dan is a treasure in the science community, especially the Ornithology community and is one of my favorite follows online. I actually have a little history with Dan's family. I attended SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, and Dan's mother was one of the first people that I met there. She's amazing. I expect nothing short of amazing from Dan. Fun fact, Dan's mom actually wrote me a letter of reference to my very first big girl job as a scientist. I'm really excited to get to know Dan. I already know this is going to be a hilarious episode,
Dr. Raven Baxter (02:24):
Dude. Okay, so today we're going to talk about birds. So yeah, birds. That's what I do. End of podcast. Just kidding. I'm so excited. Especially in the previous conversations that we've had on the podcast, birds have been brought up and largely to point out the now mind you, I'm a molecular biologist, so I could be getting this terminology totally wrong, A sexual dimorphism of birds. I definitely want to get into that in this episode, but before we do all that, I would love for you to explain who is Dan? How did you get to be who you are? I know of your parents and I met your mom.
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (03:04):
Yeah, so birds are sort of the family business. My dad guy, he was an ornithologist as well, a professional bird person.
Dr. Raven Baxter (03:12):
I want to show some love to Dan's father. Guy Baldisari was one of the most passionate scientists that you probably would've ever met. He worked at the college that I attended SUNY ESF, and he specialized in Ornithology, which is the study of birds and wildlife management. As you all know, I was not an ecology student. I never had the opportunity to take any classes with Dan's dad. What I do know is that this man was incredibly celebrated in the Ornithology community. All of my friends who are ecologists, loved guy, bald, Dari, and he's touched so many lives and has inspired so many people to go on and become ecologists. You can find a link to Dr. Bald DE's edition of Ducks, geese, and Swans of North America on our website for the podcast. Definitely want you to check it out. There's some amazing art in there. It's a great book.
Dr. Raven Baxter (04:13):
He studied waterfowl like ducks and geese growing up. I just through him had an appreciation, not for birds per se, but definitely for nature when being outside and just biology. My first love was insects. I had a great little insect collection. I'd be out all the time with my net catching butterflies and stuff, and it wasn't really until I got to college that I started poking around and asking professors what sort of research they did that I ended up in a couple of bird labs and helping with some bird projects, and then it just snowballed from there. I just developed a real intense love of birds and not just how cool they are just on their own, but just the interesting science you can do with them. Did my PhD at Cornell and hung out with all the real fancy smart bird people and then just got to travel to some really cool places, and that's one of the other things I've been super grateful about birds is they've taken me to different parts of the world.
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (05:11):
I think that's really fantastic there are worse vices to have than birds.
Dr. Raven Baxter (05:17):
I remember you had this one viral tweet that was like, I am such and such years old. I make this much a year, and this is my daily schedule, and it was just birds 12:00 AM to 12:00 PM to noon to midnight. It was just birds.
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (05:33):
Yeah, I do my best to actually live up to that as much as I can, and I'm pretty lucky I get to do a lot of bird centric things, whether it's actually being outside working with them or teaching people about them or doing research. So yeah, I'm pretty fortunate.
Dr. Raven Baxter (05:59):
What would you say are some top misconceptions about birds?
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (06:03):
Oh, there's a lot. One thing I get a lot from people is especially when I start working with people in the field with birds and people get their first experience handling birds, A lot of people are very scared of birds because they perceive them as very fragile and delicate and flighty, weird little spiritual creatures, but birds are very tough and very strong.
Dr. Raven Baxter (06:26):
Birds are so interesting to me because there are definitely different brands of birds, especially in different habitats. You've got birds that the minute you start walking towards them, they're going to run away, and then you have birds that the minute you show you're walking towards them, they don't care. They're going to just keep walking towards you and they might even fly into you or poop on you. I am from the north and we have a lot of Canadian geese and they hiss at you, and I had one Canadian goose who snapped at me, hissed at me and bit my shoelace and just dragged my shoe, just dragged my shit all the way down, like, geez.
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (07:06):
And when you work with them in the field, you can handle them like any other creature. You have to know what you're doing. That's always something that surprises people when they first get their hands on birds. It's weird if you're not used to it because they're mostly feathers, so they aren't soft and weird, but they're tough. So I think that's a misconception people have about birds.
Dr. Raven Baxter (07:24):
It's interesting because I think many people's only interactions with birds, depending on what walk of life they come from, is eating them.
(07:32)
Raven, why would you say that? Not everybody's from Buffalo, New York and not everybody in their, every waking moment of their life is stuffing hot wings down their throat with a bottle of blue cheese. Why would you say that? And Dan is going to rock with you on this because what? He's a good man, Dan the man.
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (07:52):
Totally, and you're right, and just most people don't have a total appreciation for just the diversity of birds among vertebrates. There are a lot of different birds. We have 11,000 bird species, so you're totally right. If your limitation, the limits of your understanding of birds are chickens and turkeys and things that maybe you see in the grocery aisle or whatever, you need to expand your horizons to learn about the diversity of birds that are out there.
Dr. Raven Baxter (08:21):
So basically he's saying to the woman named after a bird, if you weren't so busy stuffing chicken wings down your throat, maybe you would know something about some other birds instead of chicken thighs and chicken wings and Turkey legs. I'm just kidding guys. I'm kidding. What
Dr. Raven Baxter (08:40):
Makes studying certain groups of birds fascinating?
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (08:46):
Let's say you're not a bird maniac, but you are into physiology, right? Or you are into anatomy or whatever your science flavor is. You can find groups of birds that are great examples of that topic that you can just go crazy on and make a case study out of. So the birds that I did my PhD research on where the fairy res, these birds that we don't have in the us, they're defined in Australia, new Guinea, and they have become very famous among people who are interested in weird mating behaviors and weird sexual signaling, how birds communicate each. We
Dr. Raven Baxter (09:28):
Need to know more about this. So just context. Our first episode was Anastasia, and she studies sexual conflict in animals.
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (09:35):
Yeah. So did you guys talk about ducks at all?
Dr. Raven Baxter (09:38):
No, we talked about insects largely.
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (09:40):
We didn't come back to ducks because that's a great example. So let's say you're into sexual conflict. There's tons of sexual conflict in the bird world and certain types of birds, especially the waterfowl. So the ducks and the geese and the swans are examples of sexual conflict run wild. The fairy runs people have gotten interested in because they are really extreme example of sexual promiscuity. And so they have, they're some of the most extreme examples of birds that basically seem like they are very faithful to each other. They're taking care of the nest together. But with the advent of genetic tools to do basically like paternity tests, it turns out in very random, most of them when they open up the envelope, they're not the father. You are not the father. So basically everybody's cheating on everybody, so they look like they are a nice faithful pair, but everybody's sneaking off and mating with the neighbors. And the fairy runs are this pretty diverse group of 14 or 15 species, and they've become this little microcosm for studying that phenomenon. Why is it that they are so promiscuous, and why is it that some species are more promiscuous than others? In some cases, it gets completely out of hand. Like 70, 80% of the babies that you look at are fathered by someone other than the dad who's there taking care of them at the nest.
Dr. Raven Baxter (11:06):
So basically fairy wrens are not just stepfathers, but they're the fathers that stepped up.
(11:12)
So they're getting around.
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (11:14):
For sure, and there's been all kinds of cool studies on exactly how they do that. Sometimes they're sneaking off before dawn, while's still dark out, they sneak off the territory, go mate with somebody, come back a
Dr. Raven Baxter (11:25):
Sneaky link, if you will.
(11:27)
Oh, they're truly sneaking.
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (11:29):
In most cases, the mate is not happy about it. So they have all these strategies for guarding their mates against that. Sometimes it's physical, they will literally, so I've done experiments with these ferry rents in Australia where if you simulate a rival male coming onto the territory, so if you basically put a taxidermic mount, a sort of stuffed dead bird on the territory, the male freaks out, right? He is not happy about it, but the female's, oh, okay, she will sneak up and check out this prospective new dude, but her male, the male that she's with, who's not happy about this guy being on his territory, he will hop up and down over her and literally get in between her and the fake mail and try and push her away. And she's like, no, lemme check out what's going on. So sometimes it's like they're physically trying to keep them away.
Dr. Raven Baxter (12:23):
We see that in other species. I can imagine the exact same thing happening with humans too, obviously not with the cadaver. It's the same thing. I think that's really interesting. Fascinating.
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (12:35):
Yeah. The other mate guarding thing that's really cool about those fairy wrs that I published a paper about a couple of years back is it's not always physical or aggression on the part of the male. Sometimes it's vocal, so they will actually sing to try and prevent their female from hooking up with this new dude.
Dr. Raven Baxter (12:53):
I am now recording on a moving train. What you hear in the background is literal train horns. Shout out to Amtrak. I apologize. The show must go on. So yeah, with these birds singing, I imagine in the nineties, oh my gosh, r and b men crying in the desert, jumping up and down on their knees, begging, pleading the woman's only been gone an hour. He misses her. I'm talking about the Jodeci cry for you video, which I actually saw for the first time last week, and I was like, yeah, I totally understand how I was born in 93, if y'all had all that going on, if the men were doing all that, mom, I get it.
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (13:40):
And so that's all sexual conflict. The female wants to check out this new guy who's shown up, but the male doesn't want his female strain. And so the female will sing when the new male shows up, and then her mate will sing right on top of her to try and block her song from being heard. And it's really cool because if you didn't explore it in that of detail, you would see the male and the female on their territory and singing together, and you'd look at that in your binoculars and be like, oh, that's so beautiful. They're in love. They're singing a duet, but really it's the female trying to hook up with somebody else and the male trying to stop her.
Dr. Raven Baxter (14:17):
There's just so much to learn from animals. Can we talk about displays of, how do I say this? Displays of affection, how do animals date?
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (14:27):
Yeah. Birds have been an amazing group to study that and they show all sorts of diversity. Usually the pattern that we see in animals in this holds true for most birds is that the males are competing with each other for the attention of females. That's a really oversimplified view, and there's lots of exceptions, but in general, females are more invested in any given reproductive attempt, so they have to be a little bit more careful about who they choose. Whereas males in general, they have less invested. Sometimes it's literally just investing sperm and then they piece out and they're never seen from again. It's like as many females as I can meet with, that's what I want to make happen. And females are like, okay, I need to be a little more careful about who I invest with. And so birds are just an awesome example of what happens when that's the case.
(15:23)
And in some cases, birds have just gone to incredible lengths. They've been shaped by sexual selection over dozens of millions of years to have to do completely ridiculous things. To get the attention of females, they have to just get better and better. So you think about really extravagant examples like mannequins, which are these neotropical little neotropical birds that are found in the jungle in central and South America. These are ones that people have probably seen YouTube videos and stuff where they have these courtship arenas where they dance to attract the females. And so that's the evolutionary endpoint when sexual selection is so strong and males are competing with each other for, again, dozens of millions of years that they end up having to do some really extravagant and sometimes very arbitrary just weird things to attract the attention of females. And so sometimes the females are just watching the males and the males have to do all the work, but then there's whole other groups of birds where it's much more interactive.
(16:27)
The males and the females are checking each other out. There's cases where the male also has to be a little bit careful about who heat mates with the sort of investment is more equal. So a lot of cranes and things like that. Some of our water waterbirds are really well known for that. They'll have very coordinated dances where they are displaying to each other during courtship and trying to get all their movements all synced up, just get on the same page. So there's a big diversity of courtship sort of strategies and behaviors, and in some cases it gets really weird.
Dr. Raven Baxter (17:05):
What's the weirdest one? Honestly, we got to talk about weird.
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (17:08):
Yeah. What is the weirdest thing that a bird has to do for courtine? Wait,
Dr. Raven Baxter (17:13):
Dan, before you get into that, what's the weirdest thing you've ever done to impress a girl?
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (17:18):
Oh, that's a good
Dr. Raven Baxter (17:19):
Question. If anything, I can't imagine.
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (17:22):
Yeah, I don't know if it was really weird, but I do remember I used to work at this really nice French bakery. It was a French restaurant, and they had an amazing pastry division in this restaurant. So they had this French chef that was just whipping out amazing French pastries all the time. And while I was dating my now wife brought home a bunch of those pastries one time, and I set up, this is when we were at college, it was actually on ESF campus. I set up a scavenger hunt for her with all of these different pastries. So she had to go to different places around the campus to find them and have little notes attached to them. And it sounds really weird and corny as I'm explaining it now, but it worked. I remember she was very like, oh, very
Dr. Raven Baxter (18:06):
Honestly, that's really cool. I wouldn't even call that weird. It's unique and yeah, it seems like it worked. So shout out to the pastry shop.
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (18:16):
It did. They cranked out some good stuff
Dr. Raven Baxter (18:18):
There. Okay, thank you for sharing that. That's really cool. Guys, I hope you were taking notes. What's the weirdest thing that birds do to pick up a maid?
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (18:28):
The thing I was just thinking of that is a study that just came out from this Australian groups, the liar, birds, people might be familiar with, really famous for mimicry. They mimic all sorts of other speeches and they can even mimic like human noises. There's these really famous videos of them mimicking chainsaws and camera shutters and all sorts of things, but they also do displays. So they have these little courtship mounds and females come to visit them, and the males do these really elaborate dances to attract the females. These folks just came out with this study that showed that as part of their dance, they shake the vegetation around their little arena. So they're singing, they're dancing and they're trapping the female in this little arena, and it's like a percussion. It's like the equivalent of hitting the Moroccan or a tambourine or something as they are singing, and they have that totally coordinated with their dance steps and their vocalization. That's one of the first times that that's been shown where birds will manipulate something in their physical environment and use that as part of their courtship. So that was pretty mind blowing when that paper just came out a couple of weeks ago.
Dr. Raven Baxter (19:45):
I'm very curious about what are the series of events that happened over the, did you say dozens of millions of years? What are the series of events that caused that selection? Because it's not that it was just, oh, all of a sudden there's this one bird that was like, yeah, I'm actually going to be a rock drummer of the forest and pick up the chicks. How does this work exactly,
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (20:13):
Not just in birds, but in any field of evolution where you see a trait, something that's just so weird and so complex and so bizarre, you're just like, how did you get to that point? What were the steps that led to that? I was just having that conversation this morning with students. I was teaching ornithology this morning. We were talking about super long distance migration, like these birds that just migrate for Dans out over the open ocean. It's like how did that evolve? One bird didn't just pick up and decide to just fly across the ocean and see what happened. So with the ly bird example, that doesn't just evolve overnight. So part of it is our inability to comprehend evolutionary time, right? Dozens of millions of years of small stepwise improvements where that's how natural selection and sexual selection works. There's variation in the population and something causes some individuals to do something slightly different than the other individuals, and they do slightly better than those individuals. And so those genes get passed on at a higher rate than the ones who weren't shaking the vines.
(21:25)
And if you iterate that over and over again, over 40 million years, you can get some pretty extravagant things, especially if you combine that amount of time with super strong selection. So if the benefit that you get in terms of mates or whatever, in the case of those lyrebirds, oftentimes there's really dramatic variation in how good the males are doing. Some males will attract 10 females and the others will attract zero. So that's really high stakes. And so when you combine those two things and just do that over so many generations, you can end up with some pretty extravagant behaviors
Dr. Raven Baxter (22:06):
I want to get into then sexual dimorphism. Is it true that many males of many species exhibit more prominent and I guess decorated physical traits?
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (22:22):
Oh yeah, for sure. And that goes back to the og. That goes back to Darwin. When he was putting his theory of natural selection together, he realized that there were all these things, and birds were a great example that he leaned on a lot that didn't really fit with the concept of natural. Natural selection is all about sort of survival of the fittest. And males and females are both trying to survive, but they are often very different. Males often are much more colorful and have these ornaments and do these displays and things that females don't do. So how could that come about from natural selection? Those things don't seem to be affecting survival. They're only evolving in one sex and not the other. So you need sexual selection. So sexual selection is all about variation in how good you are at getting mates. And because of some of the fundamental differences between males and females, what limits their ability to have reproductive success.
(23:25)
Usually for males, it's getting as many females as you possibly can, and it often ends up with them being very beautifully colored and singing a lot, doing all of these things just to attract females. Whereas sexual selection doesn't work the same way in females. Their route to reproductive success doesn't work the same way. So they're not under selection to become as beautiful and as extravagant as the males are. And so that pushes them in different evolutionary pathways in terms of what they end up looking and doing. Where the males are often the more radical outlandish ones and the females are less. There's lots of exceptions to that, but that's the general pattern in most animals and in birds.
Dr. Raven Baxter (24:11):
Very interesting. So I'd like to look at humans, and we're probably speaking on this set a very superficial level because I'm not necessarily an expert in this and probably maybe not you either, because you don't study humans, study birds, but let's talk about it anyway. And so being a fashion lover, I really feel for men because when you go into any store, a department store, they have a men's section and a women's section of clothes, and what's the difference? The men's section is usually a quarter of the size of the women's, and they usually have four colors, Navy black. You literally are wearing a navy and black striped shirt. Dan is wearing a beautiful polo or collared shirt, navy and black plaid,
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (24:59):
But I'm the pinnacle of sexual selection on human male right here. This is all we're capable of.
Dr. Raven Baxter (25:05):
That's right. There's such a stark contrast between men's clothing and women's clothing, and I really wonder does that actually align with the true nature of what we could possibly do? And I walk with me here. I do wonder if we did give men human males more opportunities to express themselves in every facet, whether it's through talking about things or feeling heard, but also dressing the clothing options available, how would that actually change society? Would men actually be open to that? I want to, I don't know. How do you feel about that?
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (25:53):
It's a really cool question. Humans are very different from birds in that way in terms of what males and females end up doing physically to ornament themselves. And it speaks to the power of culture. It speaks to the power of societal norms that can overwhelm this sort of the fundamental, the biological evolution might otherwise take us. And all you have to do is look at cultural variation to see how that's the case and the fact that males are human men dress in very muted kind of boring ways. That is not true of all cultures. That's like a very western norm. And so that's really, I think the answer is to say that if you tweak those sort of cultural dials, those things can change very quickly. It's the power of cultural evolution to push things in all sorts of different ways much more quickly than genetic evolution can do. There are lots of human societies and human cultures that are much more birdlike in terms of men being showier and more colorful than the western European sort of flavor of humans. Absolutely.
Dr. Raven Baxter (27:08):
Yeah. I always tell this story. My dad is Native American and his entire side of the family also is, but I was raised by my mother and she's not. As I was learning about my heritage and my culture, my dad said, why don't you come to a powwow? And so I was very excited because I knew that meant I get to buy regalia, I get to dance, I get to participate, and there's a whole new cultural experience that I get to be a part of. And so I raced to different websites trying to find what stores can I buy regalia from. And as you probably know a little bit about me by now, I love all things sparkly, rhinestones, glitter, not really glitter, I'm getting too deep into that, but I just love adornments. I love embroidery shiny. That's me. And I couldn't find it actually for the women regalia.
(28:05)
All I could really find were, there were some things like bone and feather, but there weren't headdresses, huge headdresses there. There were just leather fringe. It was very much more plain than what was available to the men. And I'm talking to my dad, I'm like, do I have the wrong website? I am trying to find the really super adorned women's clothing, and it exists, but it's not the traditional native way of dressed for women. It's the men. And my dad was like, Raven, we model after nature. And if you look at nature, the men are the ones who are more decorated. They're adorned and the women. So I just had to sit with that and be okay with my leather fringe.
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (28:52):
Yeah,
Dr. Raven Baxter (28:52):
Yeah,
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (28:53):
Yeah. It's interesting. I think it's such a fascinating topic because it is very tempting to fall into this fallacy of this is the way that this facet of evolution works in animal X, Y, and Z, so that's how it should work in humans. We have this just unprecedented layer of cultural complexity on top of all of our biological evolution that makes some of those connections really difficult to make. So yeah, it's a cool topic. And then there's tons and tons of diversity in how sexual selection works in humans, and it's just massively variable.
Dr. Raven Baxter (29:34):
Yeah, I totally agree. And that's one thing I really like about this podcast is we get to touch on all of those things, even if it's just a little bit. And even if both of us aren't experts, I really love making the space to even just ask those questions and invite people to think about it so that we can just keep talking about it. There's connections everywhere. Science is everywhere. Okay, so let's go on to music.
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (30:09):
Oh, yeah. You know something about this. You're fresh off of breaking the internet for rediscovering music that white people have known about for decades.
Dr. Raven Baxter (30:22):
Yeah. Hey, I'm happy to be a part of a club. I've been really widely embraced into the white community.
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (30:30):
Come on in Fleetwood Max for everybody.
Dr. Raven Baxter (30:32):
Yeah. Yeah. My boyfriend got me a Fleetwood Max shirt and the vinyl album, and I immediately put the shirt on, and as soon as I stepped out of where we were and into the general public, everyone's like Rumors. I love that album Rumors. Best album ever. And I'm like, wow, I just made so many friends.
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (30:51):
Yeah. You had no idea what you were missing out on.
Dr. Raven Baxter (30:53):
No, absolutely not. And so I love music birds. Actually, there's a Fleetwood Mac song, what is it in 17 or not 17, something like Sing like a White. What did this woman say?
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (31:06):
Yes, Stevie Nicks a white wing Dove,
Dr. Raven Baxter (31:09):
Right? Yes.
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (31:10):
Let's see. Oh, it's not coming to me.
Dr. Raven Baxter (31:12):
I'm going to Google
Dr. Raven Baxter (31:13):
It now. When I teased this episode, some of you told me that you didn't know that the lyric was white winged dove. I got one winged dove from one of you. I got wide winged dove like, come on, y'all didn't know the song lyric. Y'all didn't know the song Lyric song been out for damn near 50 11 years.
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (31:40):
Yeah. There's another Fleetwood Max song, which is where I thought you were going, which is it's a really beautiful, more like romantic song. Stevie Nicks was the lead singer, but Christy mcv was the other singer of that band, and she's the lead singer on this other beautiful song called Songbird. It shows up in a lot of weddings and stuff. It's just like a very kind of beautiful song. But yeah, the other, this Stevie Nicks song is totally escaping me, but
Dr. Raven Baxter (32:06):
Just like the White Wing Dove sings a song. Sounds like she's singing. Ooh, ooh,
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (32:13):
Yep.
Dr. Raven Baxter (32:14):
What does a white wing dove even sound like?
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (32:18):
Yeah, they are very kind of cooey. The doves are actually a super, super diverse family. They're like, I dunno, maybe the second or third most diverse family of birds. There's a couple hundred of them. They're super, super diverse in the old world, tropics like southeastern Asia and things, they tend to have just variations of that kind of cooing sound. So they're not the most complex kind of beautiful intricate singers, but they are very vocal and a lot of them super colorful too. The tropical ones are really beautiful.
Dr. Raven Baxter (33:00):
Do you have a favorite bird song?
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (33:02):
Favorite bird song? That's a good
Dr. Raven Baxter (33:05):
Question. Okay. Not something you could pull up on Spotify song, but Birds that sing,
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (33:12):
There's a lot of good bird songs. One of the ones that comes to mind that's familiar around here that I really is the Winter Ren, people might know the House wr, they're like little brown guys. The Winter Ren is a Ren that kind of hangs out in the woods and really bubbly, cute sounding song. But I like them because they sing forever. Their song is yeah, little, they're like little stubby tailed, little fat little guys, but they have this great song that just goes on and on. They're one of these species that sings forever. When you hear them singing, they just go and they go. For my Ornithology class, they have to learn their bird songs, and the way you remember them is they just sound like they're never going to shut up. They sing and you keep waiting for them to stop and they just go, keep going, going, going. This time of year, they start getting going. One of the first Spring birds that starts singing, Ooh,
Dr. Raven Baxter (34:08):
There is a bird song and I'm going to attempt to sing it. This is so bad, but it's two notes, so maybe you'll know what it is. I used to hear it in Buffalo a lot, and they would come out in the morning and it'd be like,
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (34:21):
That sounds like a black cap chickie.
Dr. Raven Baxter (34:24):
I literally Googled what Bird Makes a He Who Sound and Black Cap Chickie came up, so I really wasn't that far off.
Dr. Raven Baxter (34:33):
Yeah,
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (34:34):
Black Cap Chick, they sing. It's a two note song like that. It sounds very Wist. It's Phoebe. Yeah, that's what that sounds like to me. So they're a resident species around here, so they're here year round. During the winter, they're usually not singing right around this time of year, everybody's getting all Twitter painted and ready to go, and they start singing very early too. What
Dr. Raven Baxter (35:03):
Was that word you just said? Twitter painted
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (35:05):
Twitter painted, I think. I don't know where that came from, but it came from deep in my brain somewhere. But I think that comes from Bambi. Some of the characters in Bambi say Twitter paid, and I can't remember who, the little bunny rabbit or something when I think they're trying to describe the birds and the bees and they're like, well, you get this Twitter painted feeling. I think that's where that comes from.
Dr. Raven Baxter (35:28):
Just looked it up. It means infatuated or obsessed or in a state of nervous excitement.
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (35:35):
Exactly. So that's what this time of year when the breeding season was starting up, I think that's a good way of describing what's going on with most birds. They're very Twitter painted, so they get all sing songy,
Dr. Raven Baxter (35:46):
Excited or overcome by romantic feelings.
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (35:49):
Yeah, nothing wrong with that.
Dr. Raven Baxter (35:52):
Interesting. I learned a new word today. Are you Twitter paid? Answer me in the comments.
Dr. Raven Baxter (35:58):
Hey, what are you doing? Enjoying the podcast. That's what I thought. Well, you might as well rate us five stars and follow so you don't miss any updates. Thank you. What does it mean to fly like an eagle? Fly Like an eagle?
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (36:15):
That's a good question. There's a lot of eagles coming overhead right now. In fact, this is the peak time to say, at least in the northeast, to see big birds of prey migrating overhead. So what are eagles doing? They're doing a lot of soaring. They're very good at conserving energy, so in a way they're cheating by, you're
Dr. Raven Baxter (36:33):
About to piss off a lot of American patriots who identify as bald eagles.
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (36:39):
There are a lot of less imposing, less impressive birds that are actually much more powerful flyers, right? They're flapping all the time and with something like a dinky little hummingbird like flies straight across the gulf of Mexico just flapping and flapping. Whereas the supposed big powerful eagle is just letting the wind do all the work for it and just soaring around. So I dunno. You tell me, which is more impressive,
Dr. Raven Baxter (37:03):
Honestly, emus?
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (37:05):
Yeah, or just not flying at all.
Dr. Raven Baxter (37:09):
Just the sheer mass of an emu. I'm impressed
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (37:12):
By it. I'm wish you on that. Yeah, so I did my dissertation research down in Australia studying these ferry runs, and I had a few run-ins with emu, including one that, so we used nets to catch the birds that they're called miss nets. They're like a picture, like a volleyball net, but made out of very fine material so the birds can't see them. So birds flying along and it pops into the net so you can catch them and take 'em out and do whatever you have to do with them. One day I was out in the outback chasing my ferry, runs around trying to get 'em to fly into the nets, and there was an emu that was bedded down in the grass that I didn't see, and it popped up and poked its head around. It just started running full speed towards my net and just crashed through it and just took it off, ripped it off, and took it over the horizon. I never saw it again. Yeah, so I remember having that impression of that is an impressive bird. I don't know. They could run 30, 40 miles an hour or something. They're pretty gnarly.
Dr. Raven Baxter (38:06):
Oh hell no.
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (38:09):
And they're like, yay tall. They're pretty impressive.
Dr. Raven Baxter (38:12):
Speaking of tall birds running fast, okay, are we good to get into dinosaurs?
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (38:18):
Oh yeah. If we're going to talk birds, we've got to talk dinosaurs.
Dr. Raven Baxter (38:21):
Why is that for the audience?
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (38:24):
Yeah, this is people always, you will hear occasionally people say, oh, birds are dinosaurs on earth, and you're like, what exactly does that mean they're related to dinosaurs or they look like dinosaurs? No, they are literally dinosaurs. They are the living descendants of dinosaurs, and had it not been for this mass extinction event that killed off what we think of as dinosaurs, though their evolutionary cousins would be right alongside them. The therapod dinosaurs, the upright bipedal, predatory dinosaurs like your T-Rex and your Velociraptor and all those, those were the ancestors of birds. So that's the evolutionary lineage that birds came from. So birds really are the dinosaurs that are left on earth.
Dr. Raven Baxter (39:12):
Hey, it's me again with an intrusive thought. What if we had dinosaur wings? What if we had chicken wings, but they were dinosaur sized? Oh, Chad,
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (39:29):
And they have lots of similarities and we have all sorts of nice transitional fossils that really make that case pretty clear that they share a lot of things in common structurally, anatomically probably even the more we're learning down to their feathers. We think of feathers as this thing that's unique to birds, and they're unique to birds among animals that are currently on the planet, but we now know the dinosaurs, all sorts of dinosaurs were covered in feathers, and even going way back to OSAs, right? These big flying extinct reptiles that predate dinosaurs or going back like 150 million years or something, birds are feathered dinosaurs in the realest sense of the word.
Dr. Raven Baxter (40:15):
Is it true that owl's legs are actually longer than we think they are?
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (40:20):
Most parts of birds' bodies are longer than you think they are because birds are covered in feathers that do a really good job of hiding all of the structural anatomy that's underneath. Even. Most birds look like they really don't have any necks because they're all feathered and a lot of raptors and owls or raptors are like the predatory birds that are grabbing things to their talons like owls and hawks and eagles and things. They spend a lot of time with their legs tucked up into their body and they're so poofy and feathered, and in a lot of cases their legs are all covered in feathers. They look like they just have little toes sticking out of their bodies. But if you ever see one of those raptors, like something like an owl come down and reach out and extend its legs to grab something, they have super long legs.
Dr. Raven Baxter (41:08):
I feel as though a lot of people would be mortified if they actually knew what was underneath the feathers.
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (41:14):
Oh, yeah. It's really weird when I do anatomical stuff with my class and owls are great example because a lot of them, at least the owls that are up in the high latitude areas, up around where we are, a lot of them are very cold adapted, so they're super fluffy and they have just tons, tons of their body that's devoted to feathers to keep them warm among other things. But then if you pluck all those feathers off, they look completely different and a lot of times, if you're not used to it, very kind of bizarre.
Dr. Raven Baxter (41:48):
I wonder if I can find pictures of featherless birds are there. Oh wait, there are featherless birds, right?
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (41:55):
There's lots of birds that all birds have some feathers on their body, but there are lots of birds that have big chunks of their body that are not covered in feathers. A lot of the scavenging birds like vultures have pretty bare heads. They don't have any feathers on their heads because they're spending so much time rooting around in carcasses and covered in blood and guts and stuff, and so they've evolved to not have any feathers that can get all gunky and nasty. So that's the best example of sort of a bird that I can think of that has big parts of its body that aren't covered. Do
Dr. Raven Baxter (42:28):
Penguins are penguins, oh my god, guys, remember, I'm not in this field, are penguins, birds, and two, they have feathers like,
Dr. Raven Baxter (42:36):
Alright guys, I don't even care if you judge me. This was a valid question from me. One, I'm autistic. Two, Dan said, all birds have feathers. And then that made me think, wow, a bird that I can identify that I haven't really seen feathers on our penguins is that skin on the penguins? Why is it so smooth? I haven't really seen penguin feathers, nor have I been paying attention, but this was my intrusive thought.
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (43:06):
Definitely certified birds, great and feathers, but very highly modified, really super dense water repellent feathers and their feathers are just being used for totally different things. Most, at least the feathers that are in the wings of birds are really stiff and really strong. They're being used for flight. They have to take really strong aerodynamic forces and penguins aren't doing any of that, right? They're not flying, but they're super specialized divers and swimmers, so they have completely different feather morphology that doesn't need to keep them loft up in the air, but it helps keep them dry. It helps keep them warm, so they've just taken their feathers and adapted them for a totally different thing and then taken their fore limbs and adapted those to do something totally different as well. They basically turned them into flippers.
Dr. Raven Baxter (43:57):
That's really interesting. And so what do you think would happen if we put a penguin, a flamingo, a two can and a bald eagle in the same room? Would they be like, yeah, birds, what's up?
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (44:12):
Yeah, they have more in common with each other than are different, but yeah, they, let's see, our penguin, our flamingo, our toan and our bald eagle, they probably have not really seen much of each other before, that's for sure, but I think they would chill because even bald, you might be tempted to think of a bald eagle's going to be the aggressive one. It's going to some of the other guys or attack them or whatever, but bald eagles are pretty wimpy. They mostly are scavengers. They steal food from other things and they'll eat scavenge for carcasses and things. I don't think the other guys wouldn't be scared of them. I think they would chill.
Dr. Raven Baxter (44:51):
They would just really hang out. I think we should, can we do this experiment or is that unethical or unethical?
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (44:57):
I dunno. We'd have to maybe come up with a better justification than just will they chill?
Dr. Raven Baxter (45:03):
That's how they used to do science back in the day, just very much. Oh, wonder what would happen.
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (45:07):
Yeah, no, it's true. I was talking about that with my ornithology class this morning. It was this classic experiment of they basically took sparrows and drove them across country basically to figure out if they could figure out their way home. One of the classic experiments showing that birds are really good at migrating back to the place they were born and this old school experiment, they were just like, how would we figure this out? All right, you take some in a van and drive 'em to Louisiana and you get some others in a van and drive 'em to Maryland and then let 'em go and we'll see what happens.
Dr. Raven Baxter (45:36):
Yeah. Wow. Do all birds sing now? I'm thinking. Do penguins sing?
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (45:40):
Yeah, I mean, penguins make vocalizations. I would say just about any bird you can think of makes a vocalization of some kind. There are birds that are well known for a complex kind of beautiful singing, so the songbirds, the birds that we call songbirds. That's a part of the evolutionary tree of birds. One of the things that makes them unique is they have the anatomy that allows for really complex vocal production. The avian equivalent of our voice box, the larynx in birds is called the snx, and the songbirds have very intricate anatomy that allows them to, among other things like control multiple bits of airflow at the same time. The syrinx and birds is much farther down. It's down where the trachea branches down to go to each lung, so there's two independent paths of airflow that are coming up into the snx at the same time, and so one of the cool things that the songbirds have done is they figured out how to control both sources of air at the same time so they can essentially make two sounds, two overlapping sounds at these exact same time, and so something like a penguin can't do that.
(46:59)
They make more like grunting calls, but they don't have the anatomy required to make really complex beautiful songs.
Dr. Raven Baxter (47:09):
Okay, so it's things like that. Obviously more things like that, but that separate the species. There's even core anatomical differences between birds.
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (47:19):
They all have unifying characteristics. They're all laying eggs. They're all covered in feathers, but there's 11,000 species and they're on every corner of the planet. They have massive underlying differences. In some cases it's anatomical and yet really complex vocal production. Anatomy is potentially one of the things that's allowed the songbirds to become super, super diverse and super differentiated is their singing ability and the ability to attract mates and for species to start sounding different, which is something that can keep them separated. If you sound species A sounds different from species B and they no longer recognize each other as mates, that's one of the things that can cause them to split into multiple species. That could be one thing that is an explanation for why we have so many different types of birds is all these underlying differences that separate them.
Dr. Raven Baxter (48:14):
I know that the people listening want us to talk about birds that mimic sounds that they hear. For example, I saw a bird. I'm not sure what kind it was. I'm sure you would be able to tell me exactly what bird it is, but they were singing earth, wind, and fire September over and over again. Super cute, but why?
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (48:34):
It sounds like it was probably a parrot of some kind. The parrots are really well known for that. We call that mimicry and there's vocal mimicry. It's pretty widespread in birds. There are a lot of birds that can do it, but they vary in how much they can do it and what sort of things they can mimic. A lot of species will mimic the songs of other birds, and then some birds are taking that to the extreme where they can mimic all sorts of other sounds, including potentially humans. One of the ideas for that is that it's due to sexual selection, so it is a trait that individuals might care about if they want to learn something about their mate, right? Maybe your ability to learn a whole bunch of different sounds and incorporate them into your repertoire and the sounds that you can produce that's communicating something about your cognitive abilities, your sensory abilities, and so that could be something that a potential mate would care about. The other idea that's out there is that the sort of social complexity of the species, so how complex the structure of the groups that they live in. Are they hanging out with a whole bunch of other individuals that they need to talk to and keep straight and be able to tell apart, oh, okay, that's Bill, that's Jeff for real. That can lead to more vocal complexity. You need more of a vocabulary to be able to manage those complex social situations, so some of the more social birds will have complex vocal abilities including mimicry,
Dr. Raven Baxter (50:10):
But don't penguins
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (50:11):
Hang out. Yeah, penguins hang out, but they're environmentally forced to hang out. They're not hanging out in a social sense in terms of interacting with each other or getting some mutual benefit. They're just all, they nest colonially, right? They're forced into all being on the same little shelf of an ice flow or something where there are nesting sites or whatever, so they end up hanging out in really big groups, but they're not really communicating with each other.
Dr. Raven Baxter (50:42):
Whoa. And then if I'm not mistaken, penguins, they couple up and raise little baby penguins.
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (50:51):
The male and the female have pretty strong pair bonds. They have to communicate with each other and divide up the reproductive labor. One will keep the chick warm while the other goes off and swims for hours to find some fish and bring back to the nestlings. They're a great example of a species where they need mom and dad to raise the offspring basically, so there's very high investment from both of them. They both are very careful about who they meet with because they need help from the other one. They can't do it by themselves to come back to what we were talking about before. They are not sexually dimorphic the males and the females look very similar because they don't have this situation where sexual selection is just running away in the males. The males have to do all this extravagant stuff just to attract the attention of female that then they piece out and they never see 'em again. Right. That's not how it works in penguins. They are much more intimately bonded. They're very careful about choosing each other. They stay together much longer.
Dr. Raven Baxter (51:50):
Interesting. So how if a lot of the males look the same, then what is driving the female to the male to say, I want you for the rest of my life?
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (52:02):
Sometimes it can be things that the male will give the female directly, so sometimes during courtship, males will give food to females where they might have a territory that's particularly good that gives the female good places to put a nest protection from predators, all sorts of things on them. Would
Dr. Raven Baxter (52:23):
You say that there's an amount of foresight then? Do animals think, wow, that's hot, I want him, or is it nature? Is it nurture? Is it a thought process? Obviously we can't read minds, but what do we know about how animals think?
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (52:37):
Oh, yeah. It's a great question. With any behavioral thing, when you just see animals doing something, it's so tempting to think how aware are they of what they're doing? Is this female really looking at these two potential males and thinking that guy's going to be a better dad or that guy's going to give my offspring better genes? And the short answer is they're not doing that, right? You don't need to assume that level of sort of cognition or that level of sort of awareness. What's more likely happening is that there's two things happening simultaneously. There's the ultimate benefit that you get from making that decision. If I choose that male, he's going to pass on some good genes to my offspring, but does the female have to actually know that? No. Right. Sexual selection builds some mechanism that allows the female to make that choice, and those can be very simple rules like pick the male that sticks out the most, or pick the male.
(53:46)
That's the brightest, pick the male. That's the loudest. Those sort of kind of simple mechanisms will get the female that evolutionary benefit without her needing to be consciously aware of why she's making those choices. Right? Yeah. It's an interesting thing to think about the timescale involved with evolving these mechanisms when you're talking about millions of years and billions of potential behaviors. Some of 'em have worked and some of 'em haven't worked. The ones that have worked died off and the ones that worked were selected for and were passed on. You do that over millions and millions of years and you can build up these very complex behaviors without necessarily needing the animals to be consciously aware of what they're doing. Right. But it's a really interesting thing to think about, so tempting to anthropomorphize and be like, oh, she knows that guy looks good or whatever. He's going to be a good dad, but does she really not in the sense that we're thinking about it. Her ancestors did something that got them some benefit, right? And so she does the same thing. It's a tricky thing to think about that kind of that question of sort of consciousness I did want to bug you about is your philosophy about science and communicating science and just what you do, because I think you do it a lot better than I do and a lot more seriously than I do. I just talk shit and see
Dr. Raven Baxter (55:12):
What happens. I feel we both do that,
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (55:14):
But I mean, I think you are more impactful than I am, but I think the reason I've really liked following you and wanted to talk with you, so is I think we have similar philosophies about making science real and making it approachable and not trying to hide behind jargon and weird technical, esoteric aspects of it.
Dr. Raven Baxter (55:37):
Absolutely, and that's a huge part of this and is central to my intention behind the podcast, is talking about science not just in the technical way, but in the social way, and also it's important for me to set an example as a scientist in making sure people know I don't know everything, and I love interviewing people outside of my area of expertise because dude, I just asked you if penguins or birds, which is super basic, and
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (56:05):
We confirmed they are, they're they're
Dr. Raven Baxter (56:06):
Birds, but when you said all birds have feathers, I'm like, I don't know if penguins have feathers, but they do. So I can do scientific reasoning, but again, knowledge is power and you have to feed the knowledge into the reasoning so that you can understand the world around you. And so if have people who don't have knowledge, but they have the reasoning, they're going to grasp onto anything that they can to make sense of the world around them, and that's how we get conspiracy theories. That's how we have bumper stickers from people who say, birds aren't real. I don't even know what that means. I haven't even looked into that. Why have you seen the birds aren't real thing?
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (56:42):
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm with you a hundred percent. Right? You need to sort of embrace the fact that we don't know everything while also understanding the toolkit that science gives us to figure out what is real and what we have evidence for versus what's bogus, right? It's okay to not know everything, but we can channel our curiosity and not be afraid of it toward more productive, more realistic, more science-based explanations. That's what science is. It's just a quest for filling gaps that we are always going to have, but filling them with things that we can back up with empirical data rather than conspiracies. Right. Any person's inquisitiveness can lead them astray.
Dr. Raven Baxter (57:28):
Yeah. I think that's ultimately what creates a scientist though, is that natural curiosity drives us to want to answer questions, and for some of us that leads us to science. For other people, they might have other interests that they capitalized on or got into. They might develop some alternative theories of how the world works. We got to make space for that too, but spaces where we can come together and share our perspectives and how we think, I think is a great way to move science forward.
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (58:01):
Yeah, no fun and nobody knows everything anyway. If that's what science was, it would be pretty boring. It would not be very interesting to me personally if it was just about opening up a textbook and memorizing what we know about this subject and then just being able to regurgitate it. That's really only going to get you so far.
Dr. Raven Baxter (58:17):
What made you develop, oh, do you have something to tell me? Come here. Carbon. I would love to know how did you get into your philosophy of practice for science communication? Because just being transparent here, you're one of the few white guy academics who I feel like gets it. I think the way you talk about science is so accessible. I'd love for you to share. Are you naturally like this? Did you experience things that informed your practice? You come from an amazing family of science that could very well be just a natural trait of Dan.
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (58:57):
Yeah. I don't know. It's an interesting thing I do in a lot of senses, I have a lot of privileges and a lot of cultural capital around academia. It was not just the fact that science could even be a career path was not really a mystery to me because that's what my dad did and he worked as a professor. I think it's just my personality to not be very stuffy and very ivory tower ish. I, and I think biology, most biologists tend to be that way a little bit because at the end of the day, we're not splitting the atom. We're not sending rocket ships to space. We're trying to figure out why animals do the things they do. I'm just following my passion. I'm doing this kind of esoteric sort of corner of biology that I find interesting and I try to teach people about it.
(59:48)
It would be very weird, I think, to get a big head and develop an ego around being a bird scientist. I'm sure it's a lot more tempting if you are a cancer researcher or a neurosurgeon or something. I can understand how maybe you could develop an ego and have trouble communicating to the lay person, but to me I'm just, I dunno. I just try and be myself and yeah, that's just my personality, to not create some alter persona that knows more than other people. I just don't have any interest in trying to together, trying to fabricate that personality. Right. That's just not who I am, and I just think it just makes it more fun to mix in learning about science, but also learning about the people who do it, people's personalities and just understanding that they're real people and they have political meanings and they have cultural backgrounds that inform what they think is important. That's all part of science. Science doesn't just happen in some vacuum where it's like, oh, we follow these laws of nature and we choose what we're going to study. We choose where we're going to work, we choose the students that we teach it to. So those are all social things. Those are not just totally divorced from society. Those are choices that we make. So yeah, I just try to be real about those sort of things and yeah, it makes it more fun I think.
Dr. Raven Baxter (01:01:12):
I agree. There was one last thing I wanted to talk about regarding birds is how do we protect birds? Because if bird species don't exist, Dan won't have a job. And we like Dan,
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (01:01:25):
Birds sign my paycheck in a lot of ways.
Dr. Raven Baxter (01:01:27):
But I mean, all jokes aside, birds are a very important part of our ecosystem ecosystems across the world. So what are some threats to bird species? How do we protect birds?
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (01:01:38):
It's a great, very important thing to think about. Birds are struggling and they're not unique in that regard. We know that we're in a conservation crisis across different taxa, right, but birds. Yeah, birds are not doing great. There's a pretty famous study that came out recently that showed this since 1970. We've lost about 3 billion individual birds from the North American population of birds. That's like about a 30% loss. It's sad and it's drastic and it's something we have to face those type of numbers. But the interesting thing is that if you dive into those numbers, okay, we've lost 3 billion birds, and you can ask what type of birds are we losing and are there any that are doing okay? And some of the more pronounced examples of the types of birds that are actually doing all right or have even seen their populations in are things like waterfowl, so like ducks and geese and swans.
(01:02:38)
And one of the main reasons why that has happened is because there's lots and lots of money and resources behind conserving those types of species, ironically enough, because people like to hunt them. So there's all sorts of hunters out there that want to be able to have nice, healthy, thriving populations of ducks so they can hunt them. But that actually has had, it's been a net benefit for those type of birds. They raise money and they raise awareness and they care about those birds and care about there being habitat for those birds, and that's had a positive impact on them. The other example of birds that have been doing relatively well recently are the raptors, like the predatory birds, like the hawks and eagles. A lot of those birds have been seeing population crashes due to things like pesticides, really toxic chemicals that were being put out in pesticides, so things like bald eagles and ospreys, or really famous examples where they were ingesting these toxins and they were thinning out their eggshells.
(01:03:39)
That was the main effect that they were having on them. The eggs either wouldn't develop properly or the birds would actually crush the eggs while they were sitting on them. We banned DDT, and since that relatively small change is had a massive positive impact on those birds, and they've seen their populations increase. In New York in the sixties, there was one known pair of breeding bald eagles in the entire state, and a combination of banning those pesticides and some other conservation efforts, their numbers have gone through the roof. The population has totally recovered. And so I always like to mention those examples because they show that conservation actions work when we make it a priority and we do the things that we know that we have to do, the birds will respond. And so there's all sorts of other things that we can do. We can do things like keep our cats inside.
(01:04:33)
We know that outdoor cat, I've seen you post about that outdoor cats kill billions of birds per year. Just keep the door closed. Birds colliding with windows that kills probably about a billion birds a year in the US alone. And being mindful about how we're designing buildings and treating the glass of existing buildings are very simple things you could do to treat the glass, to make it so the birds can see them, and so they don't collide with the glass anymore. Imagine if we could save a billion birds just by doing something like that, making the glass safer for them. There are things that we know that we can do to help birds, and the nice thing is that birds have shown us that they will respond if you give them a chance. Stop poisoning them, right? For example, oh, look at that. They do just fine. It can feel very overwhelming to like, how are we going to get 3 billion birds back? What can I do? What can Raven do to make a dent in that number? But there are little things you can do like that, right? Keeping your cats inside, doing things like if you have a house and you plant things around you, in your garden, around your house, choosing to plant native plants rather than exotic plants, because we know that native plants support more insects, which the birds can then eat.
Dr. Raven Baxter (01:05:50):
I invite everyone to go to the website, the science of life.com and find some resources. You can also find Dan's information, his cool picture of him holding bird. Thank you, Dan, for coming. I feel like I will have a part two with you in some time. Maybe in person. I'll come up to upstate New York and we can vibe. Maybe we can go birding or something.
Dr. Dan Baldassarre (01:06:15):
Oh my God. Yeah, I would love that. I would love to link up again. We could figure out something else to do.
Dr. Raven Baxter (01:06:20):
Of course, everyone, thanks for listening. Bye.
Dr. Raven Baxter (01:06:23):
Well, that was another wonderful episode of The Science of Life. I'm your host, Dr. Raven Baxter, and I'll see you next time. You can find me on socials at Dr. Raven the Science Maven, and don't forget to subscribe and rate us five stars so you don't miss another episode. I.
