Speaker 1: Get value. You can't argue with at Tesco with their
Speaker 1: amazing club card prices. Have the perfect night in with
Speaker 1: their finest frozen pizza meal deal. Get a finest frozen pizza,
Speaker 1: chips and ice cream all for six euro like our
Speaker 1: delicious spicy salami, hot honey and do you or Margarito
Speaker 1: wood fired pizzas served up with their crispy chunkie chips
Speaker 1: and ice cream like Sea Salt de Caramel or Pistachio
Speaker 1: for dessert. Can't argue with that. Shop in store or online.
Speaker 1: Tesco Every Little Helps available at most stores. Prices vary
Speaker 1: in express.
Speaker 2: Oh hey, okay, hello Hi. From the Ghost of Three
Speaker 2: Year's Future from twenty twenty one. I'm here with an
Speaker 2: encore of one of the funniest favorites episodes ever, Corvet Thetatology.
Speaker 2: Why because it's spooky but it's not at all too scary.
Speaker 2: And also I'm in a hotel in Fremont and early
Speaker 2: tomorrow morning, your pod mom Jarrett is going under the
Speaker 2: knife for knee surgery. A lot's going on. So here's
Speaker 2: Corvid the Anatology. You're gonna love it, Listen to it again,
Speaker 2: Send it to someone you love. Or to someone you
Speaker 2: barely know. Okay, oh, hy.
Speaker 3: Is that old guy sitting on a shabby sheet couch
Speaker 3: in Anthropology waiting for his daughter to try on pants
Speaker 3: that cost too much?
Speaker 2: Ali?
Speaker 3: Ward back for another episode of Ologies. A spooky episode
Speaker 3: of Ology is a scary episode. Okay, fine, But does
Speaker 3: it get gotha than the inky blue sheen of a
Speaker 3: crow in the shadows who also happens to be having
Speaker 3: a funeral for another crow. Nothing is more goth than that. Nothing,
Speaker 3: Not even a spider listening to Bauhaus on vinyl, a
Speaker 3: bat smoking a clove at a warehouse party is not
Speaker 3: as goth as a crow funeral. And I've been sitting
Speaker 3: on this episode since July. I've been waiting to air
Speaker 3: it this week. I've been just building with nausea. I'm
Speaker 3: so excited to talk about Corvid thanatology freakin' crow funerals.
Speaker 3: But first I will talk quickly as I tell you
Speaker 3: things that also matter.
Speaker 4: Okay.
Speaker 3: Thank you to patrons at patreon dot com, slash Ologies.
Speaker 3: Thanks to everyone for buying cool stuff at ologiesmerch dot com,
Speaker 3: and thanks for subscribing to and rating the podcast, especially
Speaker 3: for reviewing it, which helps get it seen by other people,
Speaker 3: and each week to prove that your reviews mean so much,
Speaker 3: I read you a fresh one, and this week I
Speaker 3: creeped on serious Beetles, who wrote, I have been experiencing
Speaker 3: an odd twilight zone effect or shortly after listening to
Speaker 3: one of your shows, a moment in my life was
Speaker 3: so much richer from a thing I learned there. For
Speaker 3: just one example, snails. I met a tiny pack of
Speaker 3: wet sidewalk snails. As I crouched intensely over their little
Speaker 3: googly eyes, I was overcome by an appreciation of their
Speaker 3: love darts, tiny hermaphroditic bodies, beauty products from their m
Speaker 3: word and French immigrant past so much I cried, Serious
Speaker 3: Beetle that rules, thank you for letting me creep your review. Okay,
Speaker 3: corved thanatology, what the fuck word? Crow funerals. Yes, you're
Speaker 3: about to listen to an hour long interview about the
Speaker 3: grieving behaviors of crows from one of my favorite alive
Speaker 3: scientists on the planet. It's so good, she's so good. Okay,
Speaker 3: So Corvid's quick background belong to a group of perching
Speaker 3: birds with a developed vocal organ. That's what makes a
Speaker 3: corbet sometimes these birds are called songbirds, but apparently ornithologists
Speaker 3: have gotten into like almost fistfights about the term songbirds.
Speaker 3: So which birds are Corbet's okay? They include crows, ravens, rooks, jackdaws, jays, magpies,
Speaker 3: tree pies, chuffs, and nutcrackers, which kind of sounds like
Speaker 3: an alice in Wonderland chest set, or a roll call
Speaker 3: of gnomes, perhaps a menu of local draft beers from Portland.
Speaker 3: But it's a real list. I just read verbatim just
Speaker 3: to make sure that I don't get any wrong and
Speaker 3: cause any more mythological fisticuffs. Anyway, we're talking about crows
Speaker 3: and how they die, so you're going to hear about
Speaker 3: why crows have this death laden reputation and some unsettling
Speaker 3: science mask facts. And we'll hear about desperate alarm calls
Speaker 3: and feeling like an outsider, and how brains work, and
Speaker 3: radioactive tracers and murderers but not the sad kind, and
Speaker 3: plague doctors and all kinds of dark goodness that will
Speaker 3: have you sitting on a park bench staring into the
Speaker 3: treetops with this new found fascination once you hear the
Speaker 3: bonkers tales of biologists and corvid banatologist Kayleie Swift.
Speaker 4: I'm so excited to talk to you.
Speaker 3: So here's this, there's your microphone. Here, here's mine. First
Speaker 3: thing that I always do is just ask people to
Speaker 3: pronounce their first last name, just to make sure that
Speaker 3: I say it right.
Speaker 4: Sure, Kaylee Swift, Okay, just checking.
Speaker 3: I believe he was pronounced though. I think it's doctor Kate.
Speaker 3: This is where I just lose my shit about it.
Speaker 3: I mean, how long have you been a doctor.
Speaker 4: Like like forty eight hours?
Speaker 5: Oh my god, No, maybe seventy two that since Friday
Speaker 5: night at nine thirty.
Speaker 4: Oh my god, tell me everything. It has been.
Speaker 5: A whirlwind sprint. I did two degrees and six years.
Speaker 3: Oh my god. So it was really fast. So doctor
Speaker 3: Kaylee Swift got her master's in science in animal behavior
Speaker 3: and neuro ethology. I think that's how the brain affects
Speaker 3: what animals do. I think that's what that means at
Speaker 3: the University of Washington in twenty fifteen, and then she
Speaker 3: launched straight into getting her PhD. She completed her research
Speaker 3: about crow death behaviors and just over three years she
Speaker 3: defended her PhD on the last night possible before the
Speaker 3: end of the quarter, like her dissertation was due by
Speaker 3: midnight that day. And this breakneck pace was partly because
Speaker 3: there was a postdoctorate position in Denali that started right after.
Speaker 3: She wanted to be able to hop over and do
Speaker 3: that work. Also, the first time she mentioned she was
Speaker 3: moving to Denali for a while, I asked if she
Speaker 3: had to get a lot of travel vaccines, and then
Speaker 3: I realized that Denali is a park in Alaska and
Speaker 3: not a small island in the malaria belt. Anyway, She's
Speaker 3: very smart and hard working, and she busted proverbial ass
Speaker 3: for that. PhD, You're not usually under the gun like that, Like,
Speaker 3: how'd you deal with it?
Speaker 4: I cried a lot.
Speaker 5: I yeah, I had a few moments where I was
Speaker 5: just like, oh, this is it, buzz So I did that.
Speaker 5: I reached out to my peers and said, I need
Speaker 5: you to text me and tell me I'm going to
Speaker 5: do this and everything's going to be okay. And they
Speaker 5: did it because they were wonderful, and I worked really hard.
Speaker 5: So it was kind of a combination of those three things. Okay,
Speaker 5: So now tell me what.
Speaker 3: It was about crows that made you so interested, Like,
Speaker 3: and when did you start really studying them. Did you
Speaker 3: always like sit in parks and like high school and
Speaker 3: stuff and just like gaze at crows or was there
Speaker 3: a moment?
Speaker 5: No, there was definitely a moment. So I, since I
Speaker 5: was a little kid, loved animals and always really gravitated
Speaker 5: towards science.
Speaker 4: I could stare at bugs all day. I know, I
Speaker 4: just thought they were so cool.
Speaker 3: I'm with you.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And I could look at pictures of bugs and
Speaker 5: books and read about them. But I wasn't you know,
Speaker 5: I wasn't like journaling as a little kid or taking
Speaker 5: fastidious notes. But then as I got older, you know,
Speaker 5: in high school, it was sort of like and but
Speaker 5: as I went into college, I had circled back around
Speaker 5: to wanting to do wildlife sciences or animal behavior more broadly.
Speaker 5: And I didn't really have a preference or an idea
Speaker 5: of what exactly that would look like. And I had
Speaker 5: in thinking about what kinds of questions really interested me.
Speaker 5: The answer I kept coming back to is this idea
Speaker 5: of the social intelligence hypothesis, which is this idea that
Speaker 5: being social and having these complex social lives may have
Speaker 5: really driven our cognitive advances.
Speaker 4: Because it's difficult to do that.
Speaker 5: It takes a lot of brain power and that question,
Speaker 5: and you know, there's lots of nuanced ways that you can.
Speaker 4: Look at that. That has always really captivated me.
Speaker 5: And so reading mind of the raven and being like,
Speaker 5: I like birds, I like animal behavior and cognition, and oh,
Speaker 5: look at this. There's this whole group of birds that
Speaker 5: now you know, science is collectively saying like, oh, wow,
Speaker 5: I guess we were super wrong about the capabilities of birds,
Speaker 5: Like look at what grows and ravens can do.
Speaker 3: Did they have to issue an apology to birds at
Speaker 3: some point? Like fuck, man, We're sorry, you got great brains.
Speaker 3: You're doing games over here. Like was there a moment
Speaker 3: in time culturally where we were like, We're so sorry birds.
Speaker 5: I don't know if that has happened, but if it hasn't,
Speaker 5: it really should.
Speaker 4: Okay.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And you know, one of the things I've experienced
Speaker 5: through my research is still a lot of people don't.
Speaker 4: Really realize that.
Speaker 5: And that's been one of the most rewarding things about
Speaker 5: doing my work is seeing people go, wow, I had
Speaker 5: no idea that they did this. That's so cool. I
Speaker 5: like crows more now. So that's been, like I said,
Speaker 5: just one of the most rewarding parts of the research.
Speaker 4: That I've done. Uh so, yeah.
Speaker 5: So the marriage of all of those things birds and
Speaker 5: intelligence and animal behavior is what led me to crows.
Speaker 5: And then, really serendipitously, my undergraduate advisor at the time
Speaker 5: I was going through this revelation happened to be working
Speaker 5: on the Facial Recognition publication with one John Mars.
Speaker 3: Who's like the dude when it comes to wearing creepy
Speaker 3: masks around crows.
Speaker 4: Yes.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's like, you know a handful of crow experts
Speaker 5: in the United States and he is one of them,
Speaker 5: and so it was like, oh, this's.
Speaker 4: Worked out nicely, right.
Speaker 3: I mean, I feel like in your research, were you
Speaker 3: to google you, were someone to google you.
Speaker 4: I feel like photos of.
Speaker 3: You wearing a ghastly mask with like a Halloween mask
Speaker 3: that someone had left in their trunk for several years,
Speaker 3: but there's you holding a dead crow with the mask on.
Speaker 3: I have so many questions, so really quick. Doctor John
Speaker 3: marslaf Professor of Wildlife Science at the University of Washington,
Speaker 3: was Kayley's PhD advisor, and he's been studying crows for years.
Speaker 3: You may be familiar with his research in wearing certain
Speaker 3: masks around crows, which showed the hell, yes, they very
Speaker 3: much identify human faces, and they will squawk up a storm.
Speaker 3: This is technically called scolding when they see a foe,
Speaker 3: kind of like we see in human beings at a
Speaker 3: professional wrestling match or an episode of The Real Housewives, which,
Speaker 3: let's face it, those two scenarios are just two sides
Speaker 3: of the same coin. So, for example, if a researcher
Speaker 3: trapped a crow for observation wearing a certain mask, most
Speaker 3: of the local crows in the future will freak out
Speaker 3: if someone casually walks by them in the same mask.
Speaker 3: Human beings might also freak out that they didn't study
Speaker 3: but they started using this ghastly cro magnum mask and
Speaker 3: a Dick Cheney Halloween one, but ended up in the
Speaker 3: end employing some specially made masks later in the study,
Speaker 3: which I'll be honest are kind of creepier because they're
Speaker 3: like someone's face but just a little bit off. So
Speaker 3: imagine like Michael Myers with shoulder length hair, standing in
Speaker 3: a park and writing down everything you did on a clipboard.
Speaker 3: But before we get to all of that work specifically,
Speaker 3: let's throw this thing in reverse for a second. Okay,
Speaker 3: I'm gonna start basics. I'm going to go back a
Speaker 3: little bit. Difference between a crow and a raven, And
Speaker 3: why do you study crows and not ravens.
Speaker 5: I'm sorry, I don't know this. I think ravens are bigger. No,
Speaker 5: don't apologize at all. It's a really common question. And
Speaker 5: why would you know this unless you'd ask somebody earlier. So,
Speaker 5: crows and ravens are different species, but they're in the
Speaker 5: same genus, so like a lion and a tiger. Okay,
Speaker 5: but they're really superficially similar looking, so it's easy to
Speaker 5: mix them up so that the main things to look
Speaker 5: for is ravens are about two and a half times
Speaker 5: the size of a crow. Okay, So I always tell
Speaker 5: people if you're like out and you see a crow,
Speaker 5: and you go, that is the biggest bleebity bleep crow
Speaker 5: I've ever seen. It's probably because it's a raven in flight.
Speaker 5: The easiest way to tell them apart is crows have
Speaker 5: more sort of squared tails versus ravens have this really
Speaker 5: distinct wedd shaped tail. Oh, and then if you are
Speaker 5: close enough to see one or see a picture of one,
Speaker 5: you'll notice that the throat feathers on a raven are
Speaker 5: really textured like a beard versus crows have really smooth
Speaker 5: hair like throat feathers, and on a raven we call
Speaker 5: those special feathers hackles, and they articulate them and use
Speaker 5: them in a lot of visual behavioral displays. But that
Speaker 5: once you you know, get a look at a few photos,
Speaker 5: that feature becomes really easy to detect. So those are
Speaker 5: sort of the three big physical ones. Their voices are
Speaker 5: really different.
Speaker 3: How are their voices different?
Speaker 5: So crows do the classic you know caw and ravens
Speaker 5: have this much deeper, more hollow croak sound. Yeah, it's
Speaker 5: a very and ravens both both species make a huge
Speaker 5: diversity of really cool noises. But personally, I think the
Speaker 5: vocal repertoires of ravens are are cooler.
Speaker 4: Than the air for crows. Don't tell the crows.
Speaker 3: I said that crows are like, she just defended got
Speaker 3: our PhD and she's throwing us under the bus. Twitter,
Speaker 3: What about can ravens make voices?
Speaker 5: Crows, ravens and magpies are excellent excellent mimics.
Speaker 4: Yes, they're they're.
Speaker 5: Essentially parrots crazy not maybe not quite the in terms
Speaker 5: of the volume of their vocabulary, but their accuracy to
Speaker 5: the human voice outstanding.
Speaker 3: Crazy. Yeah, who is creepier or more goth closer Ravens?
Speaker 5: I would say ravens because they have more of a
Speaker 5: habit of plucking eyes out of living things.
Speaker 3: Go.
Speaker 5: Crows will do that too, but I think ravens have.
Speaker 4: More of that reputation.
Speaker 3: It's pretty hardcore.
Speaker 5: Yeah, well, you know that's skin is thick. Mammalian skin
Speaker 5: is thick. So if you're hungry, I mean you're gonna
Speaker 5: you're going to.
Speaker 3: Go for the easy part, get the good stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 3: that's very Marilyn Manson. Man, that is HALLOWEENI is all
Speaker 3: get out. So when Kayley got to graduate school, she
Speaker 3: started looking into projects that involved these complex, fascinating big
Speaker 3: bird brains.
Speaker 5: John had already started to do some studies with the
Speaker 5: functional imaging work that we do where we look at
Speaker 5: crow brains, and he had already been inspired doing.
Speaker 4: That, like, oh, it would be really cool if we.
Speaker 5: Would show them a dead crow, because humans for a
Speaker 5: long time have known that crows respond really strongly to
Speaker 5: their dead. This is that idea is not something that
Speaker 5: I contributed to humankind, And so he thought that that
Speaker 5: would be cool, U, But in order to do that,
Speaker 5: you really need to have this field component so that
Speaker 5: you can say, like, this is what they do in
Speaker 5: their normal environment, this is the external manifestation of their behavior,
Speaker 5: and then we can look inside their brain and then
Speaker 5: try and tell the whole story.
Speaker 3: So their research involves observing the verbs in their natural
Speaker 3: home externally from AFAR, and then after that they're like, hey,
Speaker 3: heypes Burbs, come take a quick science vacation with us
Speaker 3: just a few weeks. We'll look at your brain function
Speaker 3: before releasing you again into the wild to tell some
Speaker 3: pretty great alien abduction stories at your next crow party.
Speaker 5: And so we talked about that a lot, and the
Speaker 5: advantages of that project were one that it's awesome. Two,
Speaker 5: it was feasible financially because you know, I didn't need
Speaker 5: expensive tracking devices or tags or anything like that. So
Speaker 5: it was it was low cost, which was important because
Speaker 5: I had zero funding. I had gotten an amazing fellowship
Speaker 5: from NSF to support me personally through three years of
Speaker 5: graduate school, but it didn't include any research funds, and
Speaker 5: he didn't have any research funds for me. Those masks
Speaker 5: are free man well, so fortunately the masks had already
Speaker 5: been bought and secured before the previous facial recognition study. Yeah,
Speaker 5: so I'm just trying to make it work with like,
Speaker 5: what resources are already here?
Speaker 3: Where do those masks come from? I'm so sorry, such
Speaker 3: a dumb question.
Speaker 5: No, not a dumb question, because nobody knows the answers.
Speaker 5: They had costume makers come and take molds of actual
Speaker 5: people's faces. So I always tell people to be gentle
Speaker 5: when they talk about the masks because Linda and Vivian
Speaker 5: and Joe are all actually.
Speaker 4: Real people whoa yeah, which are not a scary in
Speaker 4: real life?
Speaker 3: I assure you, I'm sure one thousand percent. Okay, but
Speaker 3: that's good to know. And so you were like, I
Speaker 3: don't have a lot of funding. I have zero fundings.
Speaker 3: And so this idea that instead of tracking and tagging
Speaker 3: or killing and dissecting the animals, you're like, we can
Speaker 3: look at their brain activity using functional MRIs.
Speaker 5: So not MRIs, We use a process called FDG PET Okay.
Speaker 5: And the reason that we don't use an MRI is
Speaker 5: that you could not train a crow to go into
Speaker 5: an MRI and not have, you know, a meltdown. So
Speaker 5: they would just say, would all their brain activity would
Speaker 5: be panic.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's a good point.
Speaker 5: So basically what we do is we capture crows in
Speaker 5: the wild and we have an aviary that's fit to
Speaker 5: house crows. The housing is acceptable for a couple of months,
Speaker 5: and we give them a few weeks to get acclimated
Speaker 5: to captivity and just kind of calm down a little bit.
Speaker 5: And then the night before we're ready to image a subject,
Speaker 5: we take it into the radiology room and it goes
Speaker 5: in a smaller cage and we give it overnight to
Speaker 5: acclimate to that, and then the morning that we're ready
Speaker 5: to image, we take the bird out and we inject
Speaker 5: it with something called FDG, which is a modified glucose
Speaker 5: molecule with a radioactive tracer attached to it.
Speaker 3: Oh my gosh, So this this is a pet scan
Speaker 3: like a cancer patient.
Speaker 4: It is exactly the same process.
Speaker 3: My dad had to get a pet scan, so and
Speaker 3: we had to tell him not to eat carbs for
Speaker 3: like a days before and he was like, this is bullshit.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and that's one of the reasons they have to
Speaker 5: go in overnight is so that then they don't get
Speaker 5: any food. Basically, the idea of this process is, so
Speaker 5: we give them this glucose injection. Your brain uses glucose,
Speaker 5: you know, as it works. Whatever part of your brain
Speaker 5: is working the hardest is going to use the most glucose.
Speaker 5: So once we give them this injection, we can show
Speaker 5: them something like a dead crow, or an empty room,
Speaker 5: or the face of a familiar threatening person or a
Speaker 5: familiar caring person, and whatever they're part of their brain
Speaker 5: is working, work and working to process that information is
Speaker 5: going to concentrate that glucose. And the reason I described
Speaker 5: it as a modified glucose molecule is that it's been
Speaker 5: changed such that the body can't metabolize it anymore, so
Speaker 5: it's just going to stick there. And then what happens
Speaker 5: is after that period where we've shown them the stimulus,
Speaker 5: which we only have about fifteen minutes or so to
Speaker 5: do that, we can anesthetize the bird and put it
Speaker 5: in the scanner. And the scanner, you know, joom jum junks,
Speaker 5: goes around and it detects where that tracer landed, and
Speaker 5: we have about a forty five minute window before it
Speaker 5: starts to degrade. And then once the scanner's done, we
Speaker 5: can take the bird out, you know, keep it while
Speaker 5: it wakes up and then it's free to go.
Speaker 4: Okay, bye.
Speaker 3: Are you showing them pictures of birds that they know
Speaker 3: so that it's familiar and they're like, that's my uncle.
Speaker 2: No.
Speaker 5: So that was one major caveat. With all of the
Speaker 5: research that I did. We always controlled to make sure
Speaker 5: that they were unfamiliar birds, okay. And with the pet images,
Speaker 5: we weren't showing them photographs. We were showing them actual
Speaker 5: taxidermaid crows, right yeah, and it was just like on
Speaker 5: a stool in front of the bird.
Speaker 4: Oh my gosh.
Speaker 3: So it'd be like, Okay, you're going to go to
Speaker 3: a hotel overnight. In the morning, we're going to take
Speaker 3: you to the doctor's office. We're going to give you
Speaker 3: some super weird soft drink. It has radio tracers in it,
Speaker 3: and then we're going to take you into a room
Speaker 3: with a mummified human being and then we're going to
Speaker 3: see what part of your brain lit up.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and so what parts of their.
Speaker 3: Brains would light up when it was another dead crow
Speaker 3: or just like a pencil.
Speaker 5: So I can't talk about that yet. Who I'm going
Speaker 5: to keep that close to the vest until I get
Speaker 5: it approved by my scientific peers to make sure everything
Speaker 5: is up to snuff.
Speaker 3: So she's not allowed to say for certain, but she
Speaker 3: did give me a clue that it's one of the
Speaker 3: three areas, perhaps the amygdala, which is an area associated
Speaker 3: with fear acquisition, or something called the NCL, which is
Speaker 3: essentially the Avian analog to our prefrontal cortex and it
Speaker 3: deals with higher cognitive tasks. Might also, however, be the hippocampus,
Speaker 3: which is the little brain nugget responsible for learning and memory.
Speaker 3: She can't say, Yeah, the paper is going to be
Speaker 3: published sometime next year. I'm earnestly awaiting this like its
Speaker 3: oscar nominees. Okay, so if you're not looking at radioactive
Speaker 3: tracers in a bird headscan, what are some things you
Speaker 3: can see with your own human eyes? Can you give
Speaker 3: me an overview of some crow morning behaviors for those
Speaker 3: who have not seen it or haven't read your research,
Speaker 3: Like what happens when crows ceo, crow die or fly
Speaker 3: by and be like, oh shit, there's a dead one,
Speaker 3: Like what do they do?
Speaker 5: So the most common response is that the bird that
Speaker 5: discovers the body will alarm call, and that results in
Speaker 5: recruitment of other birds to the area to form what
Speaker 5: we call a mob So if you've ever seen crows
Speaker 5: go after an eagle or red to hawk or your cat,
Speaker 5: that's what mobbing looks like. Whoa, And that's kind of
Speaker 5: that's the most common response. But that said, there's a
Speaker 5: lot of anecdotes of them doing other things. And John
Speaker 5: and I get emails all the time from people who
Speaker 5: We had one woman send us pictures of a crow
Speaker 5: she saw. It was carrying I think like a candy
Speaker 5: wrapper or some kind of food packaging, and it flew
Speaker 5: up to the dead crow and then it left the
Speaker 5: wrapper right there.
Speaker 4: By the body. I notice you have died. Here is
Speaker 4: a twix.
Speaker 5: And we've had other people send us photos of dead
Speaker 5: crows where the other crows had left sticks by the body.
Speaker 5: So that's the you know, the more interesting stuff. I
Speaker 5: never witnessed anything like that myself, in you know, hundreds
Speaker 5: and hundreds of trials.
Speaker 4: She did see.
Speaker 5: One thing is sometimes about a quarter of the time,
Speaker 5: particularly during the breeding season, they come down and they
Speaker 5: touch the dead crows in a variety of ways and
Speaker 5: be it can manifest as just sort of exploratory touching
Speaker 5: where they sort of gently kind of poke around with
Speaker 5: their bills. It can be this really aggressive pecking and
Speaker 5: the riped feathers out and pull the wings off and
Speaker 5: do all kinds of stuff.
Speaker 4: And then in a really small.
Speaker 5: Portion, about four percent of the time they are sexual,
Speaker 5: they will attempt copulation with the dead crows. But we
Speaker 5: also saw sexual behaviors manifest in other ways actually, like
Speaker 5: sometimes they would just walk over to the crows and
Speaker 5: then solicit. You know, they have this very particular posture
Speaker 5: when they're getting ready to copulate.
Speaker 4: Oh hey, you single.
Speaker 5: And then the other really interesting thing we saw is
Speaker 5: sometimes pears would come in together and be.
Speaker 4: Like, oh my gosh, that's a dead girl.
Speaker 5: We got a fuck, and they would have sex like immediately, yeah,
Speaker 5: and it was And then something in the most rare cases,
Speaker 5: one the pair would come in and these birds aren't marked.
Speaker 5: So I believe they were a pair based on all
Speaker 5: of the observations I had done leading into it, but
Speaker 5: you know, I can't absolutely positively guarantee it. But the
Speaker 5: first the bird would they would land on the ground
Speaker 5: and one of them would stread over and be like, oh,
Speaker 5: I'm gonna mate with you, and it would get on top,
Speaker 5: and then it's partner would get on top of that
Speaker 5: one and they would have a sex sandwich with the
Speaker 5: dead crow. Yes, And the first time I saw this,
Speaker 5: you can just hear me in the video going.
Speaker 4: Oh my gosh, it's a three way with the fucking.
Speaker 5: They're having sex on top with each other on the crow.
Speaker 4: It's a three way with a dead crow.
Speaker 5: No, why are they doing Why are you doing that?
Speaker 4: Yeah? Do they think they're like this will wake them up?
Speaker 4: I think that they.
Speaker 5: Are just thinking I am full of sexy hormones right
Speaker 5: now because it is my breeding season and there's a
Speaker 5: thing down here and I am corny, and I'm mad
Speaker 5: because it's on my territory. But I'm also kind of
Speaker 5: scared because it's dead and all of those things are
Speaker 5: happening in me at once. So so so I'm just
Speaker 5: gonna do all of the things.
Speaker 3: Like maybe they're on the brim of the apocalypse and
Speaker 3: this is just the first. Like patient zero, they're like,
Speaker 3: I gotta get it in before party's over.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, so my god, we can't.
Speaker 5: Yeah, we don't know yet exactly what is responsible for
Speaker 5: this behavior, but I am very much under the impression
Speaker 5: that it's related to the hormonal shifts that they're experiencing
Speaker 5: in the breeding season and then probably manifesting is this
Speaker 5: sort of displacement behavior, which is essentially when animals are
Speaker 5: confronted with conflicting drives, sometimes they just do this third
Speaker 5: thing that's totally unrelated. So, for example, like goals, when
Speaker 5: they're faced with a competitor and it's kind of like, hey,
Speaker 5: am I going to go fight with this bird? Or
Speaker 5: am I going to run away? Like I don't know,
Speaker 5: they'll just pull grass because they're like, ah, do I
Speaker 5: run away?
Speaker 4: Do I fight? Okay, I don't know. I'm just gonna
Speaker 4: pull grass.
Speaker 5: Know.
Speaker 4: That's so confusing.
Speaker 3: That's like the worst kind of procrastination.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's what I have.
Speaker 3: Like a bunch of emails due and a bunch of
Speaker 3: stuff to write, but instead I just like clean out
Speaker 3: the silverware drawer.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Well, at least you're not you know, fucking dead people.
Speaker 3: I'm not, okay. So this episode is about crow funerals.
Speaker 3: So do they show up in bales? Do they demand
Speaker 3: to see will and testaments? Do they confess to long
Speaker 3: term affairs with the dead's best friend? What are some
Speaker 3: other ways that crows mourn the dead? I mean I
Speaker 3: know that they leave sticks, They might circle and caw.
Speaker 3: Are there any other things that you have witnessed in
Speaker 3: the wild that you're like, what.
Speaker 4: Not really?
Speaker 5: So one of the things that we've heard is a
Speaker 5: lot of people will write to us and say, you know,
Speaker 5: I saw a vigil of crows and they stood around
Speaker 5: the body for four hours, and I never saw anything
Speaker 5: like that.
Speaker 4: Definitely.
Speaker 5: One thing that happens, though, is they'll they'll come in
Speaker 5: and they'll scream and all their neighbors are come in.
Speaker 5: It'll be this really you know, ruckus thing for about
Speaker 5: fifteen or twenty minutes.
Speaker 3: So I grabbed that in a few other crow noises
Speaker 3: for this episode from Doctor Swift's YouTube channel, which has
Speaker 3: so many good videos and will be linked via the
Speaker 3: show notes. She also has some new amazing ones up
Speaker 3: from her time in the tropical balmy island of Denali.
Speaker 5: And then they kind of just start to calm down.
Speaker 5: So it's hard for me to say in those when
Speaker 5: I get those stories, if what people are saying is
Speaker 5: just kind of the end of this behavior, when the
Speaker 5: birds have started to be like, okay, well, well we
Speaker 5: made our you know, we said our thing. Yeah, or
Speaker 5: if when because you asked earlier, you know, if we're
Speaker 5: showing them familiar birds and we're not. So if maybe
Speaker 5: the explanation to some of these other, you know, ritual
Speaker 5: like behaviors is that they do slightly different things if
Speaker 5: it's a bird that they know. And I can't offer
Speaker 5: an answer to that just yet.
Speaker 3: And how smart are crows?
Speaker 5: Crows are primates essentially?
Speaker 4: Really? Yeah? So, I mean not actually, but there are
Speaker 4: far so you know they're actually monkeys? Did you not
Speaker 4: know this? Alley God, here you are disclaimer.
Speaker 3: Crows are not actually monkeys. Please do not come at me, fools.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's it's really amazing because the crow brain the
Speaker 5: avian brain, but the crow brain is really quite.
Speaker 4: Different in a lot of ways than the mammalian brain.
Speaker 4: And one of the.
Speaker 5: Main features that's different is when you close your eyes,
Speaker 5: when you think of a brain, you picture something really
Speaker 5: folded and squishy, right, Yeah, Avian brains don't have those folds.
Speaker 4: It's totally smooth. What so they have.
Speaker 5: Managed in that tiny walnut sized package with vastly less
Speaker 5: surface area to create these systems that do a lot
Speaker 5: of the same things that primates do. Just to give
Speaker 5: you some examples, crows or corvids or some evidence that
Speaker 5: they can count that they have a you know that
Speaker 5: they can they possess some kind of numeric you know,
Speaker 5: quantitative abilities. Basically, New Caledonian crows were the first species
Speaker 5: besides chimpanzees, that we discovered make and use tools, and
Speaker 5: that distinction between make and use is really important in
Speaker 5: terms of its you know, cognitive implications. They there's a
Speaker 5: lot of studies that suggest that these birds have theory
Speaker 5: of mind, which is essentially the capability to be like
Speaker 5: I am me, and I have my motivations and you
Speaker 5: are you and you have different motivations. They seem perceptive
Speaker 5: to when they're being spied on, for example.
Speaker 3: Is this because you spied on them?
Speaker 4: Tom?
Speaker 5: I mean I have definitely had experiences where it seems so.
Speaker 5: For example, to do my field work, I always targeted
Speaker 5: breeding pairs, which means I needed to follow them around
Speaker 5: and identify their nest because I wanted to control I
Speaker 5: didn't want to be right next to their nest for
Speaker 5: one experiment and one hundred meters away for another one,
Speaker 5: so I wanted to control that distance.
Speaker 3: So what you're telling me is he were wearing a
Speaker 3: mask in a wig, and you were deliberately following mating couple.
Speaker 5: So the mask doesn't go on until the experiment starts.
Speaker 5: So fortunately, because if that had been the case, then
Speaker 5: I would have never made it out alive.
Speaker 3: The idea of you just like lurking behind a tree
Speaker 3: and you're like in a full thing, just like spying
Speaker 3: on a mating pair is just the.
Speaker 4: Best kind of creepy I can possibly. It's oh, wellnest
Speaker 4: thing I can think of. It's so good.
Speaker 3: No, okay, so no, she was not wearing a mask
Speaker 3: during this research. I'm sorry, I just I got excited
Speaker 3: at the visual. But to finish this story, she was
Speaker 3: following and watching breeding pairs building nests.
Speaker 5: And I had multiple experiences where I would be following
Speaker 5: them around, watching them carry sticks to their nesting tree,
Speaker 5: and I'd be like, yes, I found it. Look, I
Speaker 5: watched them deposit all these sticks there, and then I
Speaker 5: would like leave and come back and I'd be like,
Speaker 5: huh that that pile hasn't changed at all, and I
Speaker 5: would go and hide and I'd watch them and I
Speaker 5: realized they were actually nesting in a totally different tree.
Speaker 5: And I one hundred percent think that they were doing
Speaker 5: it on purpose, that they saw me watching them, and
Speaker 5: we're like da da da minus is over here.
Speaker 4: So so that is one reason.
Speaker 5: But there was actually a really brilliantly designed study looking
Speaker 5: at ravens that more scientifically showed that they are thinking
Speaker 5: that they're imagining competitors that they can't see, which is
Speaker 5: so incredible. But yes, the to return to the masks,
Speaker 5: and I did, I should look at my phone. I mean,
Speaker 5: I bet I did one of my experiments like a
Speaker 5: block from where we are right now. Oh yeah, I
Speaker 5: did it all over downtown Seattle, which was.
Speaker 4: Hard.
Speaker 5: It was an adventure because I was working fifteen hour days.
Speaker 5: I was getting into downtown Seattle like five in the
Speaker 5: morning with my scary mask. Oh, and I saw a
Speaker 5: lot of stuff.
Speaker 3: Wait, like, at five in the morning, how many people
Speaker 3: were so scared of you?
Speaker 4: It depended So.
Speaker 5: Most most people at five in the morning are not
Speaker 5: scared of a person in a scary mask, is my experience.
Speaker 5: Most of the people who are out at five see
Speaker 5: somebody in a mask, and they're just kind of like,
Speaker 5: oh mother, It's it's like the three o'clock people who
Speaker 5: get really scared at the mask person.
Speaker 3: Did you have a sandwich board or anything that was like?
Speaker 5: So we did so we eventually got it. Took a
Speaker 5: couple of trials before I was like, oh, we are
Speaker 5: never going to get through this unless people know. And
Speaker 5: even then I had I had a woman I was
Speaker 5: doing a we were doing an experiment at Maguson Park,
Speaker 5: which is this really lovely big park in Seattle, and
Speaker 5: there's a big play area for kids, and we were
Speaker 5: out in the parking lot, right. I mean, it's not
Speaker 5: like we're being inconspicuous. I mean, how can you be right?
Speaker 5: And we had we had our taxidermat hawk and our crone.
Speaker 5: I'm standing there, I've got a clipboard and a camera
Speaker 5: and my volunteer is helping. And Joel Williams, who was
Speaker 5: my volunteer for my first couple of years and then
Speaker 5: became my full time taxidermist, actually he is a very
Speaker 5: he's a very tall man. He's about six seven, and
Speaker 5: he really likes black and cameo, which you know, personal
Speaker 5: style no problem, but that combo in a scary mask
Speaker 5: is not great. And I had a woman come over
Speaker 5: and she was like, you are scaring the crap out
Speaker 5: of my grandkids, and what do you And I look
Speaker 5: over at the kids and then you know, they just
Speaker 5: have like totally blank, neutral faces, and I'm like, okay,
Speaker 5: and so you know, I explain, you know, I'm sorry,
Speaker 5: we're doing this research on crows. I'm happy to talk
Speaker 5: to them about science. And she's like, I think you're lying.
Speaker 5: I'm calling the police.
Speaker 3: No.
Speaker 4: I was like, okay, that's an elaborate lie. But you
Speaker 4: do you, lady, did you take.
Speaker 3: The mask off during this exchange or did you keep
Speaker 3: it on?
Speaker 5: So I was never the square. I always had a
Speaker 5: volunteer do that. Fortunately, so she was talking to me
Speaker 5: unmasked person, and so yes, but there was a time
Speaker 5: where my volunteer, an officer drove up to one of
Speaker 5: my volunteers in the mask and made her take it
Speaker 5: off because there had just been a bank robbery.
Speaker 4: Oh no, like the day before, a masked bank robbery.
Speaker 5: So we had lots of adventures like that, and it's
Speaker 5: you know, it's one of those things where these stories
Speaker 5: can often be because they panned out, you know, it
Speaker 5: was never a problem. Can be funny to tell, but
Speaker 5: it's always you know, there's this flinch of pain when
Speaker 5: I do so, because I recognize how incredibly privileged I
Speaker 5: am that the story has always ended up being fine
Speaker 5: and the police were like, we believe you have a
Speaker 5: good day, right, you know, and I have to recognize
Speaker 5: that there are so many people that could not have
Speaker 5: done this work safely. And you know, there was a
Speaker 5: lot of in terms of their inner actions with the
Speaker 5: police and with the general community, because another part of
Speaker 5: what I was doing with this nest searching is walking
Speaker 5: around neighborhoods with binoculars looking into people's yards. So I
Speaker 5: had to deal with the police or just with the
Speaker 5: general public a lot, and you know, most of the
Speaker 5: time people were like, oh, crows, I have to tell
Speaker 5: you this story about this crown. And it ended up
Speaker 5: being wonderful. But you know, there's a certain percentage of
Speaker 5: the population that just is not ever going to be
Speaker 5: cool with you just loitering in front of their house
Speaker 5: and any capacity, but especially with binoculars.
Speaker 3: But you're like, I'm a white lady just to hear
Speaker 3: with some binoculars and it's like cool, I have fun.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, And I just you know, it was that sucks.
Speaker 5: It was good that we were able to do the research,
Speaker 5: but the broader cultural implications of that sucks. Because this
Speaker 5: research is freaking cool, and every kind of person should
Speaker 5: be able to do this research safely.
Speaker 2: I love her.
Speaker 3: And now, what is your background when it comes to STEM.
Speaker 3: I saw you tweet something yesterday that got like five
Speaker 3: thousand retweets already about a little bit about your background
Speaker 3: and your lead up to getting your PhD. That maybe
Speaker 3: this wasn't wasn't a career that you would have expected
Speaker 3: or people would have expected of you.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So I mentioned earlier when I was a kid that
Speaker 5: I loved that I could just stare at bugs all day,
Speaker 5: and I did, and teachers would be like, hey, we
Speaker 5: need to learn about division right now, and I was like, division.
Speaker 4: That's a straight in downtown spoken.
Speaker 5: And yeah, I had a really hard time in school
Speaker 5: when I was in grade school. And it kind of
Speaker 5: the culminating moment was we had an art project in
Speaker 5: third grade and we had those little like pinnacle flags,
Speaker 5: you know, the triangle flags, and I had the wide
Speaker 5: end on the right hand side and the narrow end
Speaker 5: on the left hand side. And to me, it made
Speaker 5: so much sense that you're the first letter of your
Speaker 5: name should start at the wide end, and then it
Speaker 5: should go as it gets smaller, And so I wrote
Speaker 5: my whole name backwards on it. This just made so
Speaker 5: much sense to me that that's how you would do it.
Speaker 5: And my teachers are like, yeah, we can't deal with this.
Speaker 5: So they they we had a very intense parent teacher
Speaker 5: meeting where they were like, we're going to hold Kaylee
Speaker 5: back because she cannot read and she's dyslexic.
Speaker 4: And I was like, no, I don't want to. I
Speaker 4: don't want to do that.
Speaker 5: So I went to a I switched to a school
Speaker 5: that had a program for kids with who were behind
Speaker 5: basically who had all kinds of different learning disabilities. And yeah,
Speaker 5: and then I worked up until basically eighth grade. I
Speaker 5: was failing classes regularly. I was medicated for a little while,
Speaker 5: and I hated it, and so I told my parents, like,
Speaker 5: I have to get off this medication, like I will
Speaker 5: figure out how to make this work. And for a
Speaker 5: couple of years I didn't. I was unmedicated and I
Speaker 5: was failing my classes. Was it like an ADHD kind
Speaker 5: of riddling?
Speaker 4: Okay?
Speaker 5: Yeah, And I went to child therapists and you know,
Speaker 5: like learning therapists, and and it was it was really hard,
Speaker 5: and I cried and just I can remember coming home
Speaker 5: from school regularly feeling like this was every day was
Speaker 5: just the worst day ever, because there was a lot
Speaker 5: of you know, shame coming from my I mean, I
Speaker 5: had close friends, but there was a lot of shame
Speaker 5: from other kids, you know, because you're going to the
Speaker 5: to the class with the kids who were behind, and
Speaker 5: like little kids are just not always nice about that.
Speaker 5: And I just I didn't understand why this was so hard,
Speaker 5: you know, I was looking around. It was so easy
Speaker 5: for so many of my peers, and I just could
Speaker 5: not understand these words in front of me, or how
Speaker 5: I was supposed to just sit in a classroom for
Speaker 5: five hours and not just think about you know, bugs
Speaker 5: and wolves and stuff.
Speaker 4: And then I moved in.
Speaker 5: Eighth right before eighth grade, we moved from Seattle, or
Speaker 5: excuse me, from Spokane to Seattle, and I switched schools again,
Speaker 5: and the level that my new school was at was
Speaker 5: essentially a year behind where the school I had been
Speaker 5: at was, so I kind of got to repeat the
Speaker 5: same grade actually without being held back. And something in
Speaker 5: that eighth grade year just sort of started to click,
Speaker 5: and I had figured out tools for developing really good
Speaker 5: time management. And then kind of after that, things started
Speaker 5: to settle into place, and school became a little bit
Speaker 5: easier for me. And now you know, I still you
Speaker 5: can see it in my tweets, like I'm a terrible speller.
Speaker 5: I make mistakes all the time.
Speaker 3: I've never noticed. I'm always like how do you do it?
Speaker 3: Because I'm like, you're getting your PhD, your tweets are fire,
Speaker 3: You've got this like super comprehensive blog, You're getting published
Speaker 3: in papers. I'm like, what kind of dime management does
Speaker 3: this woman? Astounding?
Speaker 5: Yeah, So and that is one skill that I can
Speaker 5: say that I definitely have and have worked really really
Speaker 5: hard to make work for myself. So so yeah, so
Speaker 5: that was you know, kind of the story. But there
Speaker 5: were definitely, I mean, there were so many moments in
Speaker 5: my life where I was like, I'm never going to
Speaker 5: exceed and succeed excuse me in school, like I'm just
Speaker 5: I'm not I'm just different from these other children. And
Speaker 5: even when I applied to college, I can remember going
Speaker 5: to certain colleges to you know, the admissions office and
Speaker 5: having people be like, uh, don't waste your time. You
Speaker 5: are not going to get in here. Oh my god,
Speaker 5: and just being like, well, and now you're a doctor.
Speaker 4: And now I'm a doctor, and I got an NSF grants,
Speaker 4: So screw you. There are many ways to succeed.
Speaker 5: And yeah, so that's been that's been just tremendously amazing,
Speaker 5: and I'm so you know, happy to share that story
Speaker 5: and remind people that it is painful and it is
Speaker 5: a lot of work, but people figure you know, people
Speaker 5: figured it out if you support them, if you give
Speaker 5: them tools and try new things. You know, it is
Speaker 5: possible for people to make to figure out how to
Speaker 5: make it work within this system that's really designed for
Speaker 5: a very particular type of learner.
Speaker 3: Do you think that you developed a lot of empathy
Speaker 3: that made you more interested in, like animal behavior. Do
Speaker 3: you think empathy is part of what you do observing behavior.
Speaker 4: That's a great question.
Speaker 5: I mean, I maybe I consider myself an incredibly empathetic person,
Speaker 5: but I think for me, the draw to animals was
Speaker 5: that animals are so non judgmental, Right, you're.
Speaker 4: Like my dead brother, Yeah, and they just they do.
Speaker 5: Their thing and I could watch them from afar and
Speaker 5: they're beautiful and interesting, and so it was just such
Speaker 5: a nice escape from the classroom where I just felt
Speaker 5: like shit all the time. So I think that was
Speaker 5: that was mainly what drew me to wildlife.
Speaker 3: That's interesting. I'd never thought about it that way, but yeah,
Speaker 3: I think that when you struggle yourself with filters and
Speaker 3: how to be and how to assimilate, and how to
Speaker 3: be the person people want you to be versus what
Speaker 3: you want to be or what you struggle with, Like, yeah,
Speaker 3: you look at animals and it's like, I'll sit here
Speaker 3: in front of you, I'll make eye contacts and then
Speaker 3: lick my buttthole.
Speaker 4: I feel like there and.
Speaker 3: You really get to kind of see the nature being
Speaker 3: so unfiltered, and I think that is kind of a relief.
Speaker 5: And I think the patterns in animals can be a
Speaker 5: little bit easier to detect for some people than the
Speaker 5: patterns in human beings because humans are so complicated.
Speaker 3: And how has working in corvid thanatology changed maybe your
Speaker 3: relation to mortality or morning practices. I'm hoping that you
Speaker 3: haven't had to interface with any like human funerals, But
Speaker 3: do you find yourself looking at it differently?
Speaker 5: I know that's such a good question, and I don't
Speaker 5: have a great answer for that so far, because no,
Speaker 5: I mean, I have gone through funerals, but for people
Speaker 5: for whom death was the conclusion of a very well lived,
Speaker 5: long life and not a surprise, And I often wonder
Speaker 5: if the reason for that that there hasn't been this
Speaker 5: translation between what I do as a scientist with death
Speaker 5: and then my perspective personally is because unlike something like
Speaker 5: a primate or a cetacean like a whale, you know,
Speaker 5: crows in some ways aren't incredibly human like. And I
Speaker 5: wonder if I was studying primates, if I would have
Speaker 5: more of that experience than I have than I have
Speaker 5: had studying crows. And I'm not sure of the answer
Speaker 5: to that, but.
Speaker 3: I feel like we need to have louder, more raucous funerals.
Speaker 3: Maybe let people scream if they want to. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: someone over there is making out getting a third base.
Speaker 3: I don't know. They're like, it's morning in all ways.
Speaker 3: Can we do a quick rapid fire around, yes, yeah, okay,
Speaker 3: but before your questions, patrons, we will scat some coin
Speaker 3: to a worthwhile charity, and I will shout out which
Speaker 3: one as soon as I hear back from Kayley, who
Speaker 3: is now on a remote island paradise doing bird research.
Speaker 2: Because she's the best. We've stayed really good friends, and
Speaker 2: I text her all the time.
Speaker 3: About Crowfax.
Speaker 2: She really is so wonderful.
Speaker 3: Okay. So the donation that we will make in her
Speaker 3: name to a charity of for choosing will be made
Speaker 3: possible by sponsors who you're gonna hear about. Now get value.
Speaker 1: You can't argue with Aunt Tesco with their amazing club
Speaker 1: card prices. Have the perfect night in with their finest
Speaker 1: frozen pizza meal deal. Get the finest frozen pizza, chips
Speaker 1: and ice cream all for six euro like our delicious
Speaker 1: spicy Salami, hot Honey and do Ye or Margarito wood
Speaker 1: fired pizzas served up with their crispy chunkie chips and
Speaker 1: ice cream like Sea Salt de Caramel or pistachio for dessert.
Speaker 1: Can't argue with that shop in store or online, Tesco.
Speaker 1: Every little helps available at most stories. Prices vary in
Speaker 1: express perhaps.
Speaker 2: Okay your questions?
Speaker 4: Now these tell me how this works. Questions from listeners woo.
Speaker 3: So these are from patrons from the patroon page. Sarah
Speaker 3: Preston first comment just said how weird and amazing, No question, okay, agreed.
Speaker 3: Garry Jungling says, yes, do crows wear black to their funerals?
Speaker 3: Oh never mind, answered my own question.
Speaker 4: Look at these jokers right off the bat.
Speaker 3: I didn't screen these ahead of time, and there and
Speaker 3: then I'm finding it delightful, Dane godding assd have birds
Speaker 3: ever been observed using bones of other birds to build
Speaker 3: their nests?
Speaker 5: So uh, I have, to my knowledge, there's no bird
Speaker 5: that like builds a nest primarily out of bones. But
Speaker 5: I do have an example of a raven where the
Speaker 5: nestling died and so the parents just shoved it into
Speaker 5: the side of the nest and on the X tier,
Speaker 5: not even on the interior. It's not like they just
Speaker 5: scooted out of the way. They like took it out
Speaker 5: of the nest and they just shoved it into the
Speaker 5: side of it. So does that answer question? Oh my god,
Speaker 5: can you imagine? It's just like, well the baby died. Yeah,
Speaker 5: well we get a hole in the side of the house.
Speaker 3: Anyway. Wow, that's rough. Yeah, They're like, we didn't like
Speaker 3: it anyway, Jasmine, Wealls wants to know. Okay, only kind
Speaker 3: of about bird death, but kind of not. Why is
Speaker 3: a group of crows called a murderer? And do they
Speaker 3: ever murder each other?
Speaker 4: Great question?
Speaker 5: So an FYI, raven a group of ravens is often
Speaker 5: called an unkindness. Both of those words are not scientific words.
Speaker 5: They're totally colloquial. So you'll you'll never hear me see
Speaker 5: a big group of crows and go oh a murder
Speaker 5: of crows.
Speaker 3: Oh, I didn't know that.
Speaker 4: I thought that was just like what we call them,
Speaker 4: like a parliament of owls.
Speaker 5: Yeah, nope, those are totally just lay terms that you
Speaker 5: will never see in academic papers.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I know, we're just such wet blankets, but I
Speaker 4: mean they're not. They seem very very heavily weighted with
Speaker 4: people's own.
Speaker 5: Kind of exactly, And so that the origin of those
Speaker 5: names is probably very closely tied to the relationship that
Speaker 5: developed between human and crows during the Crusades and kind
Speaker 5: of through the medieval period, where you had a lot
Speaker 5: of dead bodies, and so you had a lot of
Speaker 5: scavengers coming to take advantage of those dead bodies. And
Speaker 5: I think that, you know, the feasting on human corpses
Speaker 5: by corvids for people of that time period is a
Speaker 5: big part of what sort of cemented this ominous bad relationship.
Speaker 5: And then to boot during the plague, because the smell
Speaker 5: was so overpowering the doctors would wear these really black
Speaker 5: birdlike masks where they would that had like a beak,
Speaker 5: and they would stuff you know, flowers and other really
Speaker 5: strong smelling scents in there so they wouldn't pass out
Speaker 5: from the smell. And they looked like these walking ravens.
Speaker 3: Oh my god.
Speaker 5: So I think that's really where it comes from. Though interestingly,
Speaker 5: you know, that's fairly unique to Western cultures. In many
Speaker 5: parts of Asia, like Japan, for example, these words aren't
Speaker 5: signs of evil. They are the birds that hold the
Speaker 5: most wisdom. Actually, so it's important to recognize that our
Speaker 5: perspective of the cultural implications of these birds, that that
Speaker 5: is a cultural norm. That's not the case globally. Now,
Speaker 5: to answer the question, do they ever murder each other totally?
Speaker 5: Particularly during the breeding season. If they can, they will
Speaker 5: absolutely kill a territory intruder, and generally they try and
Speaker 5: get the bird on the ground and then they go
Speaker 5: for the wing joints and then they go.
Speaker 2: For the head.
Speaker 3: Oh my god.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's really it's brutal. And part of that is
Speaker 5: because crows engage in extra pair copulation, so you know,
Speaker 5: it might be a way to sort of keep that
Speaker 5: from happening, but yeah, they are incredibly territorial during the winter.
Speaker 5: That's really rare, and these killings they don't happen very
Speaker 5: frequently because most of the time the bird can get away.
Speaker 5: But yes, they will kill each other, and it is
Speaker 5: very dramatic when it happens because the bird that's the
Speaker 5: victim produces this really specific distress call and that is
Speaker 5: like a magnet for crows, and they all come in
Speaker 5: and they'll attack the bird that's being attacked, or sometimes
Speaker 5: they'll attack the attacker and the other A really common
Speaker 5: myth is that they will execute crows that failed at
Speaker 5: their job of watchmen, and there's no evidence of that really, but.
Speaker 4: There are crows that are watchmen.
Speaker 5: So so like in a group feeding situation, you're always
Speaker 5: going to have some birds that are are more sentinels.
Speaker 5: You know, they're on more alert and any you know,
Speaker 5: whenever you see groups of animals feeding in the same place,
Speaker 5: you'll see these kinds of patterns. And so a lot
Speaker 5: of people think, you know, if a bird didn't do
Speaker 5: its job watching out for the group and a predator
Speaker 5: comes in, that they'll like go and you know, seek
Speaker 5: revenge on that birden there's no evidence of that.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, I never heard that.
Speaker 4: Okay.
Speaker 3: So Maria Kumer wants to know what's been the strangest
Speaker 3: thing you learned so far in your study of this.
Speaker 4: That they have sex with dead grows.
Speaker 3: Charlotte Millian wants to know what is the evolutionary significance
Speaker 3: of covid grieving behavior and if there isn't any why
Speaker 3: would it become a thing?
Speaker 4: Great question.
Speaker 5: So I think the answer to that is, and we've
Speaker 5: been able to demonstrate some aspects of this in our research,
Speaker 5: that it is a way for them to learn about
Speaker 5: and avoid danger. And I think that's, you know, probably
Speaker 5: going to be the crux, the sort of seed of
Speaker 5: these behaviors in most animals, including ourselves. If you're a
Speaker 5: social species and you are capable of the kind of
Speaker 5: rapid complex learning that crows and other you know, primates
Speaker 5: and cetaceans and humans are capable of, it makes sense
Speaker 5: that if you see a dead member of your species,
Speaker 5: you'd be like, uh, oh, what happened? Like how do
Speaker 5: I make sure this doesn't happen to me? And so
Speaker 5: I really think that that's kind of the foundation of
Speaker 5: this behavior, and from there, I think it can and
Speaker 5: in compliment to that, I think you can include a
Speaker 5: lot of other motivations too, but I think that's probably
Speaker 5: the adaptive reason how it starts.
Speaker 4: That makes sense.
Speaker 3: Jen Evans had a great question do crows react differently
Speaker 3: to a natural death old age versus an unnatural death
Speaker 3: like an injury or poisoning, Because if they're doing it
Speaker 3: to learn how not to have it happen, are they like.
Speaker 4: How do I not get old and die?
Speaker 3: Like?
Speaker 4: Does that you ever enter their brains? Great question?
Speaker 5: And I don't know the answer to that, but that
Speaker 5: I mean that certainly could have been another one of
Speaker 5: the aspects I looked at, you know, in terms of
Speaker 5: my graduate studies, and it wasn't. But that's one of
Speaker 5: the next steps I absolutely think that we should take
Speaker 5: in this line of questioning.
Speaker 3: For real, it's like someone else, get on it, pass
Speaker 3: the mask down. What I mean, You're like, you're on deck.
Speaker 3: Go to the park with a clipboard. Oki wants to
Speaker 3: know do crows visit the burial place of other crows
Speaker 3: and do they bring offerings to pay their respects. You
Speaker 3: mentioned that sometimes you see them toss sticks over there.
Speaker 5: Mostly I don't know. My suspicion is that once they
Speaker 5: come in and do their thing, they're not coming back, right,
Speaker 5: because that's an energy investment, but it's also could be dangerous, right,
Speaker 5: I mean, you could have scavengers lurking in that area.
Speaker 5: And in fact, my research suggests that crows are more
Speaker 5: wary in the places, the immediate locations where they find
Speaker 5: dead crows in the days that follow. So my guess
Speaker 5: would be that you know, they're not coming in to
Speaker 5: check those locations, even from afar, once they go through
Speaker 5: their thing.
Speaker 3: And what usually kills crows. Are we talking hawks, we're
Speaker 3: talking babies.
Speaker 5: It depends on the age class first year birds. So
Speaker 5: baby crows have about a fifty percent survivorship rate in
Speaker 5: places like Seattle, and they're getting taken out by things
Speaker 5: like cars and cats and you know, windows, strikes and
Speaker 5: just lots of stuff. Adult crows have a much higher
Speaker 5: survivorship about eighty percent, and they're getting killed by things
Speaker 5: like till hawks and eagles and great horn dolls.
Speaker 3: And sometimes they'll kill it, eat part of it and
Speaker 3: then just like peace out.
Speaker 4: Yeah no, yeah, they like I'm done here.
Speaker 3: That would confuse me because like if I order a burrito,
Speaker 3: I'm finishing the burrito, do you know what I mean?
Speaker 4: Yeah, but you gotta.
Speaker 5: Think, like, especially in an urban environment, there's they're having
Speaker 5: to contend with a lot of disruptions. So sometimes it's
Speaker 5: just not worth it because you know, somebody's walking their dog,
Speaker 5: like you gotta fly up and then you're like, we're
Speaker 5: gonna just wait here.
Speaker 4: I could just go catch another one or maybe I'm
Speaker 4: full or whatever, little.
Speaker 3: To go boxes.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they're talents.
Speaker 2: I get. That's wrapped up.
Speaker 4: Donna tell Austin wants to know.
Speaker 3: Can you determine the cause of death just by looking
Speaker 3: or you know, watching the decomposition of a bird?
Speaker 2: Uh?
Speaker 5: No, I can't. There are people, there are amazing avian pathologists,
Speaker 5: folks that work for you know, government agencies whose job
Speaker 5: it is that is their The whole job is that
Speaker 5: they get bodies sent to them and they have to
Speaker 5: figure out the cause of death, to try and figure
Speaker 5: out if somebody's doing something you know that requires legal action.
Speaker 5: But I'm not that person. I can look and you know,
Speaker 5: feathers have been pulled out, it's clearly a raptor that
Speaker 5: did it. If the neck is broken and they're by
Speaker 5: a house, it's probably a window strike. If it's disease.
Speaker 5: I mean, that can be really hard to detect unless
Speaker 5: you do a ne cropsy where you actually cut the
Speaker 5: bird open.
Speaker 3: So just looking at it, you can't be like it
Speaker 3: died of sadness, no checking. Ariel wants to note do
Speaker 3: crows ever engage in cannibalism?
Speaker 5: That's a yes, right, yes, so are It has been observed,
Speaker 5: But it's really really rare. So I think I think
Speaker 5: a lot of people would guess if they didn't know
Speaker 5: much about crows aside from the fact that these are
Speaker 5: birds that they see eat a lot of garbage and roadkill,
Speaker 5: they might guess that they are totally eating dead crows
Speaker 5: all the time. And it seems like a pretty rare
Speaker 5: behavior that's more biased towards inexperienced younger birds.
Speaker 3: Wow, so they're not living up to the murder name.
Speaker 3: Necessarily interesting. Jordan O wants to know why do crows
Speaker 3: gather in such large numbers at certain times of the year.
Speaker 3: I'm talking thousands, yes for they say, yeah, great questions.
Speaker 3: So crows engage in what we call communal roosting, and
Speaker 3: this is not an uncommon behavior in birds. So during
Speaker 3: the mating season, the spring break swipe right, let's get it.
Speaker 3: On season, it's all couple skate all the time. But
Speaker 3: when there's a chill in the air and the leaves drop,
Speaker 3: things change.
Speaker 5: Come fall, crows start to all group together and sleep
Speaker 5: in central locations called russ so in Seattle, for example.
Speaker 5: And I totally recommend you check this out alley if
Speaker 5: you have enough time. We have two big roosts and
Speaker 5: one of them is at the U dub Bathel campus
Speaker 5: that house about fifteen thousand birds every night. What it's amazing. Yeah,
Speaker 5: and you stand there's this incredible viewing area on top
Speaker 5: of one of the parking lots and it's just a river,
Speaker 5: a river of crows, Oh my god, and it's incredible.
Speaker 3: I looked up a video of this and it seems
Speaker 3: like cgi. It's this gorgeous tide in the dusky sky
Speaker 3: and it's beautiful and captivating and yes, a little scary,
Speaker 3: kind of like watching a thunderstorm or an activated mob
Speaker 3: shuffling through the mall on Christmas.
Speaker 5: Eve Ravens do this too, and it's probably driven by
Speaker 5: a couple of different things. The main one is predator
Speaker 5: a version right, safety in numbers, but it might also
Speaker 5: serve as you know, an information exchange center. There isn't
Speaker 5: good evidence of that in crows, but there's really good
Speaker 5: evidence of that in ravens. Actually where they go to
Speaker 5: roost to tell other ravens about where food is. Yes,
Speaker 5: which is we can get into that, but it's not
Speaker 5: an altruistic thing. It's just a I need buddies in
Speaker 5: order to like get this food.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 5: Maybe it's where they meet, you know, socialize and meat
Speaker 5: potential mates or whatever. But but yeah, so that that,
Speaker 5: you know, the rivers of crows or the big numbers
Speaker 5: at certain times of years is basically during the non
Speaker 5: breeding season, crows all get together at night to sleep,
Speaker 5: mostly for safety and numbers, but probably for other reasons too.
Speaker 3: Is it wrong to find that cute?
Speaker 4: No, it's like a big sleepover.
Speaker 3: I know it's cute.
Speaker 5: I know it's so and it's just it's powerful. And
Speaker 5: one of the things I always like to tell people is, uh,
Speaker 5: for folks living in urban areas, we watch things like
Speaker 5: Planet Earth and we see these amazing animal migrations caribou
Speaker 5: and will debates or the you know, monarch butterflies, and
Speaker 5: you're like this, oh my gosh, that's so cool, like,
Speaker 5: I want to see something like that in my life,
Speaker 5: and you can, because this is a totally natural behavior
Speaker 5: that crows do, where they group in these big numbers,
Speaker 5: And if you live in a place like Seattle or
Speaker 5: many other metropoli ten areas across the country, you can
Speaker 5: watch crows gather in the tens to hundreds of thousands,
Speaker 5: depending on where you are, and you can have that
Speaker 5: experience of this mass collection of wildlife. And I just
Speaker 5: think that one of my favorite parts about crows is
Speaker 5: this opportunity that they present for people living in areas
Speaker 5: where they maybe otherwise don't feel a huge connection to
Speaker 5: the natural world or to natural spaces, to really engage
Speaker 5: with this animal that is native to that area and
Speaker 5: participates in so many cool behaviors, whether it's this mass
Speaker 5: roosting or just how smart they are and this attentiveness
Speaker 5: that they have to us. And so for the urban nite,
Speaker 5: they are just such an incredible opportunity for natural history
Speaker 5: and for wildlife feeling.
Speaker 3: So you can have an Attenborough moment, like in the
Speaker 3: middle of downtown. Yeah, just peep up some crows.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's awesome.
Speaker 3: That's really inspiring because that that is one of those
Speaker 3: birds we take for granted so much, so much.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but they staring at them.
Speaker 5: I know, But they're just they belong in our urban spaces.
Speaker 5: They got there naturally, and.
Speaker 4: Shit, they just do so many cool things. I mean
Speaker 4: they play. Do they play? Yes, they do.
Speaker 5: And one of my favorite I have two great playing stories.
Speaker 5: One of them was so all over Seattle, we have
Speaker 5: these ornamental trees called sweet gum trees. Yes, they're the
Speaker 5: ones that make the sidewalks really sticky, and they have
Speaker 5: these circular like ping pong sized cones, and they're really spiky.
Speaker 5: But if you like, you know, get your foot on
Speaker 5: top of them, kind of roll your foot around, you
Speaker 5: can smush down all the spikes and then they just
Speaker 5: like lit literally turn into a ping pong. And I
Speaker 5: was out at Green Lake and I saw this cran
Speaker 5: It had one and it would fly up into the
Speaker 5: air and it would drop it and then it would
Speaker 5: fly down and catch it right before it landed on
Speaker 5: the ground. And it did it, you know, five times,
Speaker 5: until I took my phone out to videotape, and then
Speaker 5: I was like, oh no, I'm done, Like mom, I
Speaker 5: don't share these stories to like create this hierarchy of
Speaker 5: things that we should appreciate. But like, these behaviors you're
Speaker 5: not gonna see in chickadees. You're gonna see other cool
Speaker 5: things in chickade's. But there is something really special about crows,
Speaker 5: and I encourage people who just think of them as
Speaker 5: these like icky trash birds to watch them and appreciate
Speaker 5: that there's this really soft side. You know, they mate
Speaker 5: for life and they can live to be seventeen years old,
Speaker 5: and they spend a lot of time reinforcing that bond
Speaker 5: and it's adorable. Yeah, they go so alo. Preening is
Speaker 5: the main way that birds do that, which means mutual grooming.
Speaker 5: So you'll see one bird kind of like tilt its
Speaker 5: head down and the other one who use its beak
Speaker 5: and it'll sort of like, you know, groom the feathers
Speaker 5: on the neck and around the face, you know, the
Speaker 5: area where the individual can't reach, so that you'll see
Speaker 5: that really typically.
Speaker 4: And they're watching you back right. I mean, like again,
Speaker 4: ticketies are cool and do a lot of cool things.
Speaker 3: That is nuts to think that the crow is like,
Speaker 3: well they got in the melt again, are they're like, oh,
Speaker 3: who's this guy coming over?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Id nuts? It is Okay, prepare for this sweetest story
Speaker 3: that you may not be able to handle. Okay, here
Speaker 3: we go.
Speaker 5: On my blog, I used to talk a lot more
Speaker 5: about Go, which Go was one of my first data points.
Speaker 5: It was a bird that I did my you know,
Speaker 5: one of my subjects for my first field experiment. And
Speaker 5: then after that experiment ended, because part of that experiment
Speaker 5: was feeding the birds, it had gotten used to me,
Speaker 5: you know, coming every day and putting food on the ground,
Speaker 5: and I was never the scary person, so they sort
Speaker 5: of continued like me after the steady ends. And it
Speaker 5: was a campus bird. It was right by my bus
Speaker 5: stop actually, And so after the experiment ended, Go and
Speaker 5: whose name is derived from her bands, which was green
Speaker 5: over orange, would always like, you know, fly over to
Speaker 5: me and be like, hey, what's up going? Am I
Speaker 5: going to get that peanut? And and it was this
Speaker 5: amazing I loved. My favorite part about it was when
Speaker 5: I was walking, I could hear her bands jingle, so
Speaker 5: I could hear when she was following me around, and
Speaker 5: it was just like there's I mean, just you feel
Speaker 5: like it's no white. It's just amazing to have this
Speaker 5: wild animal that's like, I know, you.
Speaker 4: Can I have some food.
Speaker 3: That is weird because you just think that they'd be
Speaker 3: so indifferent to you, but it's like.
Speaker 4: But they Yeah.
Speaker 5: And that's the difference between crows and a lot of
Speaker 5: birds because you can hand you know, you can train
Speaker 5: a lot like Chickene's.
Speaker 4: I don't know why I picked them, but Chickeny's are
Speaker 4: like what what? Who meets?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 5: But you can you know, like in Stanley Park and Vancouver,
Speaker 5: for example, there's a or there used to be a
Speaker 5: place where you know, there's a there's a guy and
Speaker 5: he'd hand you a little bird seed and you'd put
Speaker 5: it in your palm and the chickaties would flock to you,
Speaker 5: right because they learned that it's okay to feed from people.
Speaker 5: But they're not discriminating among those people versus crows are
Speaker 5: like you, you feed me, and I'm cool with you
Speaker 5: and I will get close to you, but not to
Speaker 5: these other people. And it's just incredible. And the reason
Speaker 5: I said I used to talk a lot more about
Speaker 5: go is she she died last year?
Speaker 4: No, how do you know?
Speaker 5: Because because she was banded. When somebody found her body,
Speaker 5: they reported her and what happened.
Speaker 4: We don't know. Yeah, it was.
Speaker 5: It was the middle of summer, so her body had
Speaker 5: already decomposed, you know, beyond our ability to detect. But
Speaker 5: she was at least sixteen whoa so yeah.
Speaker 4: Good life.
Speaker 3: So she maybe died of old age.
Speaker 4: Yeah, who knows.
Speaker 3: So they gave her a good send off.
Speaker 5: I hope so too. And I collected her body, you did,
Speaker 5: I did, so. I actually I have her bands, you do.
Speaker 2: I have.
Speaker 5: I have her bones and her bands in a little box.
Speaker 5: And I my husband, for a graduation present, actually commissioned
Speaker 5: a portrait of her. So I think I'm going to
Speaker 5: create like a shadow box with her with the picture
Speaker 5: Medicine Mayfield did the illustration. She's an amazing natural heal
Speaker 5: street illustrator based out of Australia, And so I'm gonna
Speaker 5: have a little shadow box with her portrait and then
Speaker 5: her bands because I like loved this bird so much.
Speaker 4: Yeah, she was this Yeah, I don't know how to
Speaker 4: describe it. It's just incredible.
Speaker 5: When you found out, Oh, I cried. Yeah, And I
Speaker 5: have a whole blog post about saying goodbye to her.
Speaker 5: And because she you know, I did this research because
Speaker 5: I love these birds, and because she was really close
Speaker 5: to my office, Like I said, once the experiment was
Speaker 5: over and I could start to engage with her, you know,
Speaker 5: in a more casual way, in an uncontrolled way. I
Speaker 5: would often go to her territory when I was just
Speaker 5: like bent out of shape and stressed, and she would
Speaker 5: fly over to me and I would look at her
Speaker 5: and you know, give her peanut or whatever, and it
Speaker 5: just sort of would re inspire me to keep doing
Speaker 5: the work I was doing because I was like, I
Speaker 5: love these birds. Everyone needs to love these birds.
Speaker 3: Like I wonder if this is gonna make anyone make
Speaker 3: a new crow friend at the bus stop.
Speaker 4: You totally should.
Speaker 5: I mean, you know, don't don't overdo it with the food,
Speaker 5: because you can sort of exceed the carrying capacity of
Speaker 5: your neighborhood and it can be consequential. But you know,
Speaker 5: I always have, you know, a couple of peanuts in
Speaker 5: my pocket. Really, Yeah, And then you know, I.
Speaker 4: See a crown I tossed a nut and you're like, okay,
Speaker 4: what's up? Yeah?
Speaker 3: Do you really always have peanuts in your pocket?
Speaker 4: Yeah? That's the best. Yeah.
Speaker 5: It's makes doing laundry kind of annoying for my husband sometimes.
Speaker 4: Oh my god, no, what is that? What is the
Speaker 4: shittiest thing about your job.
Speaker 3: I mean, I imagine the passing of a beloved specimen,
Speaker 3: but what what sucks about what you do?
Speaker 2: Uh?
Speaker 5: The hardest thing about what I was doing was was
Speaker 5: working in an environment where I really regularly had to
Speaker 5: deal with people, because that was often also the best part, right,
Speaker 5: because I mean that's where my science communication took off,
Speaker 5: was just having to explain constantly what I was doing.
Speaker 5: But you know, sometimes when you're just you're I'm at work.
Speaker 5: When I'm there, right, it'd be like people constantly coming
Speaker 5: up to you and whatever job you're doing, being like, hey,
Speaker 5: what are you doing?
Speaker 4: Can you explain it to me?
Speaker 5: And then the best was when I'd be like, you know, oh,
Speaker 5: I'm doing I'm with the University of Washington. I'm doing
Speaker 5: this field study on crows. But you know what, my
Speaker 5: birds they're here. I gotta take data. You know, I'll
Speaker 5: be done in thirty minutes, happy to come back if
Speaker 5: you want to point out your house and I'll tell
Speaker 5: you more.
Speaker 4: And they'd be like, oh, no, I totally get it.
Speaker 4: That's cool.
Speaker 5: So the other day, though, I want to and I
Speaker 5: just be like, I feel like you're not listening. To me,
Speaker 5: and so sometimes it'd be a little bit frustrating the
Speaker 5: day to day of making a field experiment work when
Speaker 5: you are combating people walking their dogs or people using
Speaker 5: leaf blowers.
Speaker 4: I hate leaf blowers. They're the worst.
Speaker 5: And they'd be like, it's a dead crow here, let
Speaker 5: me blow it away with my leaf blower, and I'm
Speaker 5: just like, no, God, I've been here for hours and
Speaker 5: you just ruined. Oh no, that part just you know,
Speaker 5: after years of this kind of urban field work is
Speaker 5: really it just grates on you. And just especially when
Speaker 5: I was working in downtown Seattle, just a number of
Speaker 5: times where I just genuinely felt unsafe. You know, where
Speaker 5: I was, I'm, you know, a woman, There's lots of
Speaker 5: people around, and yet sometimes you know, you get that
Speaker 5: dude and he's just staring and he's too close, and
Speaker 5: You're like, I just want to be in the woods.
Speaker 3: You're like, I going to go in the safety where
Speaker 3: there's just wolves and badgers.
Speaker 4: Exactly, which is why I'm going to Denali next.
Speaker 5: I'm like, I'm ready to have to worry about different
Speaker 5: kinds of predators.
Speaker 3: Now, what is I don't even know how you're gonna
Speaker 3: answer this, but what is the best thing about what
Speaker 3: you do? What do you love the most about crows
Speaker 3: or about your work, or about the work that you
Speaker 3: did to get your PhD A.
Speaker 5: I mean, I feel like this whole podcast has been
Speaker 5: the answer to that question. I mean, the thing I
Speaker 5: love most about crows is that they are so interesting
Speaker 5: and they are full of surprises, which sometimes was the
Speaker 5: worst thing, right because then I'd be like, God, damn it,
Speaker 5: why can't you just make this work? I am trying
Speaker 5: so hard. But yeah, I mean, just the day to
Speaker 5: day of getting to watch an animal that's so interesting
Speaker 5: and dynamic is amazing. Getting to talk to people about
Speaker 5: this animal and watch them light up when they're like, oh,
Speaker 5: can I tell you my crows story, or just that
Speaker 5: moment of people saying wow, I had no idea. I
Speaker 5: guess crows are maybe cooler than I thought. I mean,
Speaker 5: that's kind of like at the end of the day,
Speaker 5: that shift is how we build empathy with the natural world.
Speaker 5: So you know, all of those things, That's why I
Speaker 5: do it. That's why I love it.
Speaker 3: And where can people find your work? Because you tweet magnificently.
Speaker 5: Thank you, so folks can find me. A Corvid research
Speaker 5: is to short answer that question. Corvid Research on Twitter,
Speaker 5: Corvid Research on Instagram, Corverdresearch dot blog.
Speaker 3: Good job, continuity of socials is so helpful.
Speaker 4: Yes it is.
Speaker 3: You really had good foresight on that, and so people
Speaker 3: can reach out, share with you cool pictures of birds,
Speaker 3: maybe ask you questions. Yeah, so, thank you so so
Speaker 3: much for being here. I'm never gonna look at it
Speaker 3: grow the same.
Speaker 4: Good h that's my job.
Speaker 3: So I did my job, and I think for Halloween,
Speaker 3: I want to be someone researching crows.
Speaker 4: Yes that's my costume. Thank you again, Thank you so much.
Speaker 3: So find smart people, ask them stupid questions, whether it's
Speaker 3: your huge science hero or if it's a lady feeding
Speaker 3: a peanut to a bird at a bus stop.
Speaker 2: Hu.
Speaker 3: That was a trick because in this case they could
Speaker 3: be the same person. So once again, find and follow
Speaker 3: doctor Kaylee Swift. She's at corvid Research on Instagram, on Twitter.
Speaker 3: The blog is Corvidresearch dot Blog. Look up her videos
Speaker 3: on YouTube. She's Kaylei Swift on there and keep an
Speaker 3: eye out for more of her published work. And the
Speaker 3: next time you see a crow, look up, maybe give
Speaker 3: it a little thumbs up because they deserve our respect. They
Speaker 3: are very complex animals. Also be nice because they will
Speaker 3: fucking remember if you are a mean JABRONI to them.
Speaker 3: You can follow ologies at Ologies on Twitter and on Instagram,
Speaker 3: and I'm Ali Ward with one L on both. More
Speaker 3: links are up at aliward dot com, slash ologies and
Speaker 3: patreon dot com. Slash Ologies is where you go to
Speaker 3: become a patron if you want to submit questions to
Speaker 3: the ologists before I record. You can be a patron
Speaker 3: for as little as a dollar a month twenty five
Speaker 3: cents an episode. My heart is cheap Ologiesmarch dot com
Speaker 3: has cool shirts and hats and pins so you can
Speaker 3: find other Ologites in the wild. Thank you Shannon and
Speaker 3: Bonnie Dutch for managing that. The ologies Facebook group is
Speaker 3: full of the kind and the curious, and it is
Speaker 3: moderated by the kind and the curious Aaron Talbert. The
Speaker 3: theme song was written and performed by Nick Thorber of
Speaker 3: the band Islands, and all the audio stitching together is
Speaker 3: done by the lovely genius Stephen Ray Morris, who also
Speaker 3: hosts the per cast about Cats and see Jurassic Wright,
Speaker 3: which is a podcast about dinosaurs. And at the end
Speaker 3: of each episode, I do tell you a secret for
Speaker 3: those who stick it out past the credits. This secret
Speaker 3: just happened like ten minutes ago. I'm wearing a hoodie
Speaker 3: I wear all the time. It's very cozy. I just
Speaker 3: reached in the pocket and there was a dried wizard
Speaker 3: tiny lemon in the pocket. It's like almost ossified. I
Speaker 3: have no idea how long it's been there. I don't
Speaker 3: know when this got in my pocket. My estimate is
Speaker 3: at least one month. How has this tiny dead lemon
Speaker 3: not fallen out of the pocket before? How have I
Speaker 3: not realize this? It is the horseplay of a ghost. Okay,
Speaker 3: that's it for both packadermatologyology, doo zoology, lithology, technology, meteorology, seratology, deepology, ceriology, seology.
Speaker 1: It's Vessel Crow, Cameron Crow, pro Diddley Hume, Croning, great
Speaker 1: great pick, get value. You can't argue with Fat Tesco
Speaker 1: with their amazing club card prices. Serve up something special
Speaker 1: with our finest meal deal for two starring one main,
Speaker 1: two sides and dessert for only sixteen yu row like
Speaker 1: succulent board be approved irushin the Strip, loin steaks with
Speaker 1: peppercorn butter or delicious Irish chicken Parmeshanma served with creamy
Speaker 1: potato gratam and our mix of rainbow root vegetables and
Speaker 1: enjoy Goozillionaire or Soldier caramel cheesecake. Can't argue with that
Speaker 1: shop in store or online Tesco. Every little helps available
Speaker 1: almost Joy's prices vary in Express