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Speaker 5: Oh hey, it's still the guy who runs the local
Speaker 5: board game night, hoping someone shows up with the pizza
Speaker 5: place to game Ali Ward Boy, Hootie. Once again, it's
Speaker 5: part two of Striga Formology Owls. Many of you noted
Speaker 5: last week that I missed the opportunity to say alogies,
Speaker 5: and that made me feel bad because you're right. Also,
Speaker 5: you were like, does this have the same root word
Speaker 5: as an Italian witch? And I'm glad that I have
Speaker 5: the chance to clear that up in this episode, which
Speaker 5: we do, especially since I am an Italian lady who
Speaker 5: collects rocks and I have animal teeth and jars. But
Speaker 5: if you haven't listened to part one, I don't know
Speaker 5: why you're here first, because you got to go back
Speaker 5: and you got to meet Rocky. You gotta find out
Speaker 5: what an owl is, So go back to part one.
Speaker 5: We'll see you back here when you're finished. Everyone else,
Speaker 5: you made it in order. You waited a week, and
Speaker 5: now we're at the thrilling conclusion of Owls. But before
Speaker 5: we swoop into it, thank you to all the patrons
Speaker 5: who submitted questions for this episode via Patreon dot com
Speaker 5: slash ologies. This entire episode is all your questions and
Speaker 5: you two can join for one dollar a month if
Speaker 5: you're not. Thank you to everyone who's out there in
Speaker 5: ologies merch fromologiesmarch dot com and if you need kid
Speaker 5: friendly no swearing episodes, you can find them in their
Speaker 5: own feed called smologies wherever you get your podcasts. It's
Speaker 5: also linked in the show notes. And thank you, of
Speaker 5: course to folks who review the show for zero dollars
Speaker 5: and you know I read them all, such as this
Speaker 5: freshy from Escabe who wrote a litmus test slip in
Speaker 5: amazing information about slug doongs at a dinner party and
Speaker 5: see who's eyes light up? That's your new friend. Thank you,
Speaker 5: Ali Ward Escab Cornermie near the spinach dip any day. Okay,
Speaker 5: so let's get into struggle Formology Owls Part two, wherein
Speaker 5: we will discuss what to say to an owl, what
Speaker 5: not to say, exorcist heads, omens wisdom, nesting season, Stolen Hats,
Speaker 5: homicide trials, the spotted owl versus barred owl. Great debate,
Speaker 5: this guest's favorite owl and the one he wants to
Speaker 5: see the most in real life. If a group of
Speaker 5: them is actually called a parliament and so much more
Speaker 5: with your favorite owl guy forormologist, doctor r J. Rocky
Speaker 5: gutierres whoms we love. Can I ask you some questions
Speaker 5: from listeners? Are you doing okay? I know I've kept
Speaker 5: you all.
Speaker 6: I've got all the time you want.
Speaker 5: Okay, amazing?
Speaker 7: I love this.
Speaker 5: Oh okay, some questions from listeners, and we have so
Speaker 5: many good ones.
Speaker 7: Hi, Ali, this is Leilani Ramirez from Los Angeles. This
Speaker 7: is my first time asking a question, so I'm really
Speaker 7: excited to learn more about owls. I had a question
Speaker 7: about their hands feet. I'm not really sure what you
Speaker 7: would call them, but I guess their talents. I've heard
Speaker 7: that they can rotate one of their talents, so they
Speaker 7: can have them in either two to two or a
Speaker 7: three to one configuration, which I guess is why they
Speaker 7: walk so differently from so many other birds. I was
Speaker 7: wondering if all owls have that, or if there are
Speaker 7: some that don't, and how exactly that adaptation is beneficial
Speaker 7: for them. Thank you so much.
Speaker 5: So. Yeah, do they have four claws that they switch
Speaker 5: around to configurations?
Speaker 6: Yeah, they have four claws and the person is correct,
Speaker 6: but it's the how to toe is reversible, so they
Speaker 6: can put two forward and two back, and so they
Speaker 6: when they come down, they can like grab them on
Speaker 6: and have a much more secure grip on whatever they
Speaker 6: grab a hold, so.
Speaker 5: They can go three up top, one on bottom, or
Speaker 5: they can swing that thing around for a two and two,
Speaker 5: so like three dagger fingers and a spike themb or
Speaker 5: like a spock claw of death. We'll chat more about
Speaker 5: it in terms of forensic science in a bit.
Speaker 6: So that is one of the unique features of these
Speaker 6: things that they can in fact have that reversible outer
Speaker 6: toe and have two forward and two back. And the
Speaker 6: other interesting things about about owls in their talons is
Speaker 6: they're usually adapted to the sides of the prey that
Speaker 6: they take. When you see us great big owl like
Speaker 6: a great gray owl, they have relatively small talons because
Speaker 6: they're taking meadow voles and mice and small mammals, and
Speaker 6: so they don't need great big talents. And you look
Speaker 6: something like a spotted owl, which is quite a bit
Speaker 6: smaller than a great gray they have really big talons
Speaker 6: and they're catching an animal that's a third their size
Speaker 6: or wood rats is their primary prey, so they're cratching
Speaker 6: huge animals in relationship, and so it's like four stilettos
Speaker 6: going right into the body of or eight. Actually when
Speaker 6: you talk about both talons, and again you know, depending
Speaker 6: on the size of the owl, they have different strength
Speaker 6: at which they can apply to the prey. And people
Speaker 6: have actually measured this. So the amount of force that
Speaker 6: is required to release say a little owl like a
Speaker 6: borrowing owl, is something called five newtons. Well that's no
Speaker 6: more than saying it's like, you know, one point one
Speaker 6: pounds pressure. So if you apply one point one pounds
Speaker 6: of force against this, you can open up the talons
Speaker 6: of a little tiny owl and what it feels like
Speaker 6: is somebody pinching you. Like one time an owl hit
Speaker 6: the window my wife Kati, she went out to retrieve it.
Speaker 6: Actually didn't look at it, she just saw it was
Speaker 6: a bird. And the first thing, and this is a
Speaker 6: tip for the audience, if a bird ever hits your
Speaker 6: window and you don't know if it's a live or
Speaker 6: dead this gently pick it up by the whole body,
Speaker 6: put it in a box on top of a towel,
Speaker 6: and then close the box up and put it in
Speaker 6: a quiet, dark place and just leave it there for
Speaker 6: you know, four or five hours, because owls are amazingly
Speaker 6: resilient when they hit windows if they don't outright kill them,
Speaker 6: oftentimes they won't die of shock if you put them
Speaker 6: in there and they have a chance to relax and be.
Speaker 5: Quiet, and always a good idea non pros to call
Speaker 5: your local wildlife rehabber as soon as you can to
Speaker 5: get some advice too. But yeah, many say that a
Speaker 5: quiet dark box or even a paper bag helps the
Speaker 5: little birdies calm down. And if you start to hear
Speaker 5: like the a pitter patter of feet inside, they may
Speaker 5: be awake and ready to kind of pop out and
Speaker 5: then chill out. But in that time they likely don't
Speaker 5: need food or water. But if you provide it, don't
Speaker 5: try to jam it down their little throats like a
Speaker 5: beer bong, because they could choke or they'd be pissed
Speaker 5: at you. Also, to prevent the bird strikes in the
Speaker 5: first place, you can look into things like window films
Speaker 5: they have like dots or patterns, or you can use
Speaker 5: a glass marker I read to put a grid of
Speaker 5: dots on your own window. You could turn the lights
Speaker 5: off at night. You can hang things up in your
Speaker 5: windows and according to this twenty twenty three paper, evidence
Speaker 5: consequences and angle of strike of bird window collisions up
Speaker 5: to five point two billion bird fatalities maybe happening in
Speaker 5: just the United States, with potentially billions more worldwide every year.
Speaker 5: So we'll link some resources on our website because we
Speaker 5: all want birds to like us. And it can still
Speaker 5: happen even to professionals, even to professional bird people. But
Speaker 5: you can help these little fellas out, like Kat did
Speaker 5: after this strike.
Speaker 6: Well, anyway, she picked up this little owl and she
Speaker 6: snatched her, you know, and grabbed her by the finger,
Speaker 6: you know. And so then she realized, oh, I got
Speaker 6: a live one here. So it was a little pigmy ow,
Speaker 6: and she pulled the talons apart and then went into
Speaker 6: the house, and of course it lived in, which we're
Speaker 6: happy about. But other species, like the great horned owl,
Speaker 6: when it lashes onto something, it takes about thirty pounds
Speaker 6: of pressure to pull him apart, and so spotted owl
Speaker 6: is like fifteen eighteen pounds of pressure. Now, one time
Speaker 6: we were working in New Mexico and a graduate student
Speaker 6: from another university had called me up and asked me
Speaker 6: if I would show him how to catch owls and
Speaker 6: work with owls because he wanted to do a study
Speaker 6: on him, and his major professor was not an owl person.
Speaker 6: I said, sure, And of course this happens a lot
Speaker 6: in academia. Students from other universities will call up somebody
Speaker 6: and ask him for some assistance, and very typically everybody
Speaker 6: helps everybody else most of the time. And so I
Speaker 6: went out to New Mexico because I wanted to get
Speaker 6: some blood and tissue samples for a genetics study I
Speaker 6: was doing with my colleague George Baraclaw.
Speaker 5: Well.
Speaker 6: To make a long story short, his major professor wanted
Speaker 6: to see us catching up out and so we went
Speaker 6: and caught this owl, and he finally caught it and
Speaker 6: I ran over to get it. So I just grabbed
Speaker 6: its foot and it just latched onto me, and it
Speaker 6: put its talons all the way through the fat part
Speaker 6: of my hand, between my forefinger and my thumb, and there's,
Speaker 6: of course, there's blood everywhere. And the kid's major professor
Speaker 6: he walks up looking at us, and he says, does
Speaker 6: that hurt? I said no, I said, I said, no,
Speaker 6: it doesn't hurt at all. But when you start pulling
Speaker 6: this thing apart, you know you have to be very
Speaker 6: careful because you don't want to hurt the owl. That
Speaker 6: you have to apply this pressure and you can just
Speaker 6: see the owl looking at you and thinking, I am
Speaker 6: not letting go of you unless you let go of me.
Speaker 6: Oh wow, yeah, so that that happens.
Speaker 5: You know, you're just in a tense stand up.
Speaker 6: You're not a true howler can get.
Speaker 5: Nailed, okay, but what if you are, say, pet sized,
Speaker 5: wondered doctor Primo de la Kata, a retired organ grinder,
Speaker 5: as did other patrons Shana s, Alison Menard, and Nicki Lawrence,
Speaker 5: who wanted to know if the spiky jacket small dogs
Speaker 5: were really can deter an owl. Nick Lawrence also mentioned
Speaker 5: that they are concerned about a local muskrat getting attacked
Speaker 5: by an owl. So the issue of how much a
Speaker 5: larger owl can lift in its hook talents seems hotly
Speaker 5: debated and I found a lot of conflicting information, but
Speaker 5: the general advice seems to be keep your little guys
Speaker 5: on a leash unless they're a wild muskrat. But the
Speaker 5: consensus is on the spiky vest for little dogs that
Speaker 5: can't hurt at least it can't hurt as much as
Speaker 5: a bird can, And now that we know that, I
Speaker 5: would like to take a moment to share some stories
Speaker 5: from listeners who wrote in via Patreon dot com sashologies
Speaker 5: because they were good ones. Lauren Cuff noted that I
Speaker 5: live in Vancouver, PC and there's a park where barred
Speaker 5: owls have been known to dive bomb humans, sometimes even
Speaker 5: scraping their talents and causing in trees. Kathyin Buckley said,
Speaker 5: my dad got swooped at and attacked by an owl
Speaker 5: on his walk a few days ago. Is this normal?
Speaker 5: Was it the fact that he's bald? Catherine notes that
Speaker 5: he did get a tennis shot afterwards and is completely fine,
Speaker 5: and so is the owl, so that's all good. Ads
Speaker 5: the erminologist, wanted us to know that when driving a
Speaker 5: four wheeler on a farm one night, at the last
Speaker 5: minute with their head lamp, they saw a great horned
Speaker 5: owl came at their face with claws upblazing. Ads says,
Speaker 5: I did get some nasty cuts and a scar on
Speaker 5: my chin. Is this normal behavior? Was it attracted to
Speaker 5: the light and thought my face was prey. It did
Speaker 5: fly away very quickly when my arms went crazy, Ad says,
Speaker 5: And then Kathleen Carlson said, a couple of years ago,
Speaker 5: I was trail running in the winter February on Vancouver
Speaker 5: Island before sunrise, which already Kathleen like, good, good for you,
Speaker 5: and then an owl swooped right over us and made
Speaker 5: contact with my friend's head with its wing. We turned
Speaker 5: around and it followed us through the tree canopy for
Speaker 5: about five hundred meters down the trail. Mattea or recalled
Speaker 5: at one time an Eastern screech owl mail chased me
Speaker 5: for several hundred yards one of the highlights of their life.
Speaker 5: They say, anyway, do owls do stuff like that because
Speaker 5: they like it? Do they like to play? Firecaf fifty
Speaker 5: five said sometimes they come into my house. Wonder what
Speaker 5: that's all about? Firecaf fifty five, So am I what?
Speaker 5: Chris curious asked, why do barn owls act so weird
Speaker 5: around people? Ariel Mbi shared that at their college there
Speaker 5: was an owl that was famed for swooping down on
Speaker 5: students in the night and it was truly terrifying. Andy Pepper,
Speaker 5: Michelle and Emily Tiernaney all had similar queries, with Emily
Speaker 5: writing longtime Listener, First time calor, why do owls steal hats.
Speaker 5: Do owls like to go after a hat?
Speaker 6: No, actually, I don't think so. I think what they're
Speaker 6: observing is a territorial behavior or a defensive young. Some
Speaker 6: owls are very very aggressive, and if you get near
Speaker 6: their young or get near their nests, like great horned
Speaker 6: owls and uralaloals are notorious for this that if you
Speaker 6: get near their nest to the young, they attacking, and
Speaker 6: so oftentimes they're coming for your head or your eyes
Speaker 6: and they hit you in the head. And so very
Speaker 6: often people working on owls or word helmets or goggles
Speaker 6: or big hats to prevent them from getting wound on
Speaker 6: the head.
Speaker 5: Okay, I found some recent YouTube footage of a person
Speaker 5: jogging on a trail in a redwood forest, and their
Speaker 5: account is called run from Owls. Let's take a listen
Speaker 5: to a video titled owl attack Beautiful Trail Today. That
Speaker 5: is good, you got my hat. You're serious. So that
Speaker 5: owl thinks you're a big, weird ape creature, which to
Speaker 5: be fair, we are, and it wants you to leave
Speaker 5: its fuzzy babies alone. So yes, they are very serious.
Speaker 6: So that's what they're really going after. They're not really
Speaker 6: going after your hat. They're going after you, then they
Speaker 6: just happen to get your hat.
Speaker 5: Well, a few people and this information was new to me,
Speaker 5: but Pennyloader, Gomez and James Moorehead wanted to know.
Speaker 6: Well.
Speaker 5: Liz Tim asked, did the owl do it? If you know?
Speaker 6: You know?
Speaker 5: Pennyloader wanted to know what you think about the owl defense.
Speaker 5: In a homicide investigation called the staircase.
Speaker 6: Have you heard of this? I have not.
Speaker 5: I guess there was a famous homicide case where someone
Speaker 5: was implicated in the death of his wife, but then
Speaker 5: they found what could be talon marks on her head
Speaker 5: and she may have been attacked by an owl. But
Speaker 5: it was some very big crime story about whether or
Speaker 5: not this man who was up on a homicide trial
Speaker 5: for his wife, if actually an owl had attacked her
Speaker 5: and she fell down some stairs after she was popped
Speaker 5: by an owl. So that was news to me too.
Speaker 5: It's interesting that that does happen you're in if you're
Speaker 5: in their territory, that they could say, hey, get out here,
Speaker 5: I got babies around here.
Speaker 6: Yeah. That One of my colleagues from Finland who works
Speaker 6: on eur ASLs Perte, he had a video of him
Speaker 6: going up to a nest box and he was going
Speaker 6: to ban the babies. He's on the ladder and this
Speaker 6: y'all came up and grabbed him right on the butt
Speaker 6: and was trying to pull him off of the ladder.
Speaker 6: So he starts saying he's rubbing his butt because you know,
Speaker 6: they hurt and they gets you. So, yeah, it's not
Speaker 6: implausible that an al could have hit somebody like that
Speaker 6: and cause them to leaves rebellons and fall down there.
Speaker 6: But you know, I just don't know the details of
Speaker 6: why the owl would be inside a house.
Speaker 5: I think they think it happened right outside and then
Speaker 5: maybe she was bleeding started ascending the stairs up to
Speaker 5: her bedroom and then collapsed or something. Okay, I brushed
Speaker 5: up on this because many of you, Penny Loader Gomez,
Speaker 5: Lizz Tim James Moorehead asked about this and the hypothesis
Speaker 5: in the death of Kathleen Peterson was put forward by
Speaker 5: her neighbor Larry Pollard, who had seen owls a lot
Speaker 5: in the area. So babies typically hatch in late winter
Speaker 5: and early spring, but at the time of Kathleen's death
Speaker 5: in December two thousand and one, a pair of birds
Speaker 5: may already have been guarding a nesting site, so forensic
Speaker 5: teams did find a microscopic feather in her hair, as
Speaker 5: well as a small splinter of wood, and some autopsy
Speaker 5: reports show several gashes on her scalp in the shape
Speaker 5: of three with one below it, which ornithologists say does
Speaker 5: fit the pattern of talons on an owl. Now it's
Speaker 5: a longer story. The victim's husband had also been implicated
Speaker 5: in a family friend's death who fell down a staircase
Speaker 5: years before, and he did serve some time for his
Speaker 5: wife's death, which was thought to be a homicide, but
Speaker 5: he's currently free. And if you've heard of the documentary
Speaker 5: The Staircase, if that's your thing, it covers this whole tragedy,
Speaker 5: but you're not going to hear a lot about owls
Speaker 5: in it because the forensic evidence that could have showed
Speaker 5: an owl's involvement was discovered too late to be included
Speaker 5: in the trial. So the theory, though, is covered extensively
Speaker 5: in Titty Smith's twenty twenty three book called Death by Talons.
Speaker 5: But Kathleen's death and the possible owl involvement remains a
Speaker 5: mystery and sadly kind of a punchline.
Speaker 7: But owls.
Speaker 5: Are you serious? Yes, they are, Sienna red Kite, Faith Stemier,
Speaker 5: Rob Hoover, Bonnie M. Rutherford all wanted to know well.
Speaker 5: Faith wrote, yes, owls a lot of exclamation points. Do
Speaker 5: any owls migrate?
Speaker 6: Yes, they do, and some of them show nomadic behaviors. So,
Speaker 6: for example, there's a phenomenon called eruptions that the snowy
Speaker 6: owl and hawk ow exhibit when there's a what we
Speaker 6: think of failure of their primary food in the far
Speaker 6: North and they move south and invade the United States
Speaker 6: and in northern Minnesota at times. I've driven out. When
Speaker 6: I was on the faculty at the University of Minnesota,
Speaker 6: we had an eruption one year and my wife and
Speaker 6: I drove up about twenty five minutes north of the
Speaker 6: Twin Cities and we saw twenty seven great gray owls
Speaker 6: and three hawk owls and three hours. Wow, they just
Speaker 6: come in mass. So that's sort of a form of
Speaker 6: migration to movement. Some species, like the spotted owl, we'll
Speaker 6: show seasonal movements where they will leave a higher country
Speaker 6: and then go back during the winter and then come back
Speaker 6: in the springtime. But not all of them do that,
Speaker 6: so it's not a guaranteed thing. Flammulated owls will migrate
Speaker 6: tang manzals or boreal owls or will migrate in Finland.
Speaker 6: One of my greatest experiences was being invited by some
Speaker 6: Finnish scientists to trap tango manzals in north of the
Speaker 6: Arctic Circle. And we set up a triangle of nets,
Speaker 6: put a fake owl in the middle and turned on
Speaker 6: a tape recorder and sat back and we're playing this
Speaker 6: call and the northern lights are right on top of us.
Speaker 6: And we went over there. We had like eight boreal
Speaker 6: owls stuck in the nets, and I mean it was
Speaker 6: fantastic and they were on their migratory route south. So yes,
Speaker 6: some owls do migrate, Some show uberuptions, some populations proportions
Speaker 6: and birds migrate, others don't. So a lot of variability there.
Speaker 5: What is your passport?
Speaker 7: Like?
Speaker 5: Do they have to add pages to it?
Speaker 6: I usually just get new ones.
Speaker 5: Sounds like you and Kat have been so many places?
Speaker 6: Yeah, well, you know, owls are always on the top
Speaker 6: of the list.
Speaker 1: Let's go.
Speaker 4: Let's go.
Speaker 5: A few people. Mary the grapefruit tailor are and Sarah
Speaker 5: Green wanted to know is a group of owls actually
Speaker 5: call to parliament or is that just pop culture?
Speaker 6: No, that's correct, Is it really? Yes?
Speaker 5: Do you ever use that in the field, like, oh,
Speaker 5: there's a part we drove three hours and we saw
Speaker 5: parliament of owls.
Speaker 6: Well, I never have, and I don't know anybody else's
Speaker 6: it has, because we usually don't see a big group
Speaker 6: of owls like that. But you probably could call it
Speaker 6: a parliament of owls when you're looking at six or
Speaker 6: seven great gray or great girls and a hawk owl
Speaker 6: and the snowy owl on the same field, you know,
Speaker 6: so that might be a parliament of owls, although I
Speaker 6: never thought of it that way, but that is true,
Speaker 6: that's the correct term.
Speaker 5: And I know you want to know who decides these things,
Speaker 5: And evidently it's been traced to the Book of Saint
Speaker 5: Alban's written by a lady who was really good at
Speaker 5: hawking and hunting, and her name was Dame Juliana Berners.
Speaker 5: She was also a nun, and the year was fourteen
Speaker 5: eighty six. Fourteen eighty six. Let's just do it. Let's
Speaker 5: read from the Book of Saint Alban's en list a
Speaker 5: couple of groups of animals, an embarrassment of pandas a
Speaker 5: passel of possums, a conspiracy of lemurs, the well known
Speaker 5: murder of crows, a committee of mangoou is, a thunder
Speaker 5: of hippopotami, a romp of otters, and so many others.
Speaker 5: What a romp it is? And as we mentioned in
Speaker 5: the Lutronology episode about otters, nature writer Nicholas Lund has
Speaker 5: gone on record and reported that, no, these terms are
Speaker 5: not widely used scientifically, but I say use them. Er
Speaker 5: loosom folks, parliament of owls it is, and Dame Berner's
Speaker 5: is a legend to have made an eight hundred year
Speaker 5: impression on the vernacular. Speaking of remembrances, many of you
Speaker 5: needed to know about owl brains and intelligence and wisdom.
Speaker 4: M D.
Speaker 5: Carvallo, Maggie Hibbitts, Lauren Murphy has Hydro, Ariel Vance and
Speaker 5: Sarah Cheney to Americ count and ho Ruby Gordon, Julia
Speaker 5: loves fun Facts, Ashley Kay, Elizabeth Wester's friend Brandy Ray
Speaker 5: Bae Bass Siena Hope, Kiton Rossau, and first time question
Speaker 5: asker is Jade Green, owl lover, Molly Logston, Jenny Yu
Speaker 5: and Kai who asked some friends say they are really stupid?
Speaker 5: What's the lowdown now? That we've talked about their eyes,
Speaker 5: what else is in their skull striving to thrive? Ask?
Speaker 5: Do owls remember and recognize human faces? There are a
Speaker 5: lot of people wanted to know, in Sarah Cheney's words,
Speaker 5: are they really smart? Is that flim flam or true?
Speaker 5: Jennifer Grogan said, I've heard that owls actually aren't that
Speaker 5: smart as birds go, in part because their eyeballs fill
Speaker 5: up too much of their skull to be much room
Speaker 5: for brains. And Kathleen Sack said, in mythology, owls are
Speaker 5: supposed to represent wisdom, but I've heard rumors from people
Speaker 5: that rescue owls that they are profoundly dumb. What are
Speaker 5: they working with up top?
Speaker 6: I think it's best to say that owls are no
Speaker 6: smarter or no dumber than any other bird.
Speaker 5: Okay, good diplomatic concepts.
Speaker 6: They're just birds and they are predators, so they are
Speaker 6: so focused on the things that they look at. I
Speaker 6: think that is one of these other illusions that when
Speaker 6: people see that staring, in the lack of movement and
Speaker 6: the big eyes, you think they're really contemplating something deep. Yeah,
Speaker 6: but they're just saying to themselves, can I kill you?
Speaker 6: Can I eat you, that's are you? Are you? Are
Speaker 6: you small enough that I can actually handle you? I
Speaker 6: think that's what they're thinking. But they're really not any
Speaker 6: no smarter number than any other bird.
Speaker 5: Well on the brains of a lot of our listeners,
Speaker 5: Vin Haley, Bait, Nicole Campbell, Lawn Cooper, Little Boots, Caliguila
Speaker 5: val Be listening and a wolf, Shannon Cody, Mouse, Paxton,
Speaker 5: Lauren Kent, Ellie Brown, and Hannah Ridel all asked and
Speaker 5: a wolf asked why do they have such awkward legs?
Speaker 5: A mouse asked why are their legs like that? And
Speaker 5: Nicole asked, why are their long ass legs hidden? I
Speaker 5: think it went around the internet that like an owl
Speaker 5: doesn't have short, squatty legs, if you were to stand
Speaker 5: the owl up, they got big, long ones. What's going on?
Speaker 6: Well, I think what's happening is is that they don't
Speaker 6: have particularly long legs, okay, but they appear even much
Speaker 6: shorter because they're covered in feathers. Many people think that
Speaker 6: that is an adapt tape to avoid being bitten. So
Speaker 6: when they grab prey, one of the first things they
Speaker 6: do is reach down and crush the back of the
Speaker 6: skull or break the neck of the prey so it
Speaker 6: doesn't bite them. And I've caught owls and seen many
Speaker 6: owls sitting on the purchase where there's cuts on their feet,
Speaker 6: so that you know that they're getting injured. So some
Speaker 6: people think that those feathers that actually make their legs
Speaker 6: appear shorter is really an adaptation to avoid being bitten. Now,
Speaker 6: in some cases, like the snowy owl, that almost certainly
Speaker 6: serves as a adaptation to cold as well, because they
Speaker 6: have these cold areas that they live in.
Speaker 5: KaiA Messenger said, owls are my favorite animal. I've always
Speaker 5: wondered why do they do that little dance where they
Speaker 5: look like they're at a disco, and why are they
Speaker 5: so dark cute doing it? Do they do a little
Speaker 5: like hoppy hoppy hoppy kind of a thing.
Speaker 6: It's hard to know exactly what she's talking about, but
Speaker 6: I can think of a couple of things. One is
Speaker 6: they do some threat displays in which they've raised a
Speaker 6: wing up, or they go like this where they bring
Speaker 6: both wings up, and that might be something like that.
Speaker 6: Other times they do shake their feathers and move their
Speaker 6: things so it kind of looks like they're bebopping all round.
Speaker 5: And if you're thinking of an owl head bobbing and weaving,
Speaker 5: or the fact that an owl can keep its head
Speaker 5: steady kind of like a gimbal while its bod moves
Speaker 5: all around, this is called motion parallax and it has
Speaker 5: to do with that ocular anatomy. A Hey, the weird
Speaker 5: sausage eyes in tubes that we covered in part one.
Speaker 5: So if you can't move your fixed eyes around, you
Speaker 5: got to move your head. And people just they assume
Speaker 5: you're grooving, so let them now, speaking of tubes and pipes,
Speaker 5: patron Janettasaur mentioned that growing up in Saskatchewan, we had
Speaker 5: burrowing owls in our pasture, so cute, so tiny, and
Speaker 5: Atleasta Young wondered about little owls and side note, the
Speaker 5: tiniest is the elf owl, which is native to the
Speaker 5: American Southwest and Mexico, which lives in little woodpecker holes
Speaker 5: in big cacti, and it has white eyebrows just like
Speaker 5: Julia fox and it's very adorable. But back to the burrows,
Speaker 5: Danny the Dino said, one time my friend and I
Speaker 5: found a burrowing owl sitting on the ground totally steal
Speaker 5: three feet from a highway Danielle and Napolitano, Jennifer za
Speaker 5: Hernak and a wolf all had burrowing owl questions, and
Speaker 5: Heathcliff asked, what is the best owl and why is
Speaker 5: it the burrowing owl? What about the ones that we
Speaker 5: won't see, maybe roosting up high? Why do some of
Speaker 5: them burrow? Anna Beatrice mares Pasedro wanted to know what's
Speaker 5: up with those owls who live in burrows in the ground.
Speaker 5: Do they nest in trees as well? Their university campus
Speaker 5: in Brazil has a lot of them. I mean, I've
Speaker 5: seen sometimes when they're re released in the wild and
Speaker 5: they just put them on the ground and then they
Speaker 5: hop in a hole and just one after another. It's
Speaker 5: like a clown car in reverse. But with owls, why
Speaker 5: are some of them in the ground?
Speaker 6: Well, really, there's only one species that nest in the ground,
Speaker 6: but it has a very wide distribution. That's the burrowing owl.
Speaker 6: So they're found from Canada all the way to Argentina
Speaker 6: and they nest in gopher holes and prairie dog holes.
Speaker 6: They can dig their own holes, so they're the only
Speaker 6: one that actually does nest in the ground, and you
Speaker 6: can encourage them to nest in areas that are grasslands.
Speaker 6: They're grassland species. They don't nest in trees that you
Speaker 6: can actually build burrows for them. You can dig holes
Speaker 6: and put little tubes in there, like the PBC pipes,
Speaker 6: and they'll go in there and use these things. I've
Speaker 6: seen them use irrigation pipes, and yeah, burrowing owls are
Speaker 6: just cool little critters and so cute. I've seen them
Speaker 6: in Brazil, Argentina versus every South American country I've been
Speaker 6: and I've seen burrowing owls.
Speaker 5: Do they need to have a hole and then a
Speaker 5: pipe to get to the hole, like a bagpipe kind
Speaker 5: of where you've got a tunnel and then a hole
Speaker 5: on the ground, or do they just dig? Are they
Speaker 5: just like into the tunnel itself.
Speaker 6: Well, you know when they use other species tunnels, they
Speaker 6: all often go down there and create you know, a
Speaker 6: cavity within there. And they can use these things extensively.
Speaker 6: And they don't have feathers on their legs. And because
Speaker 6: they're mainly insects eaters all they do. They will lead
Speaker 6: some small mammals. They run down these things just like
Speaker 6: they're running on a little race, you know, down down
Speaker 6: the holes, and they can almost any kind of a hole.
Speaker 6: They can use as an access point to get down
Speaker 6: into these holes and enlarge them at the end.
Speaker 5: I've never seen one, but I really would love to.
Speaker 5: And you know you mentioned that they go all the
Speaker 5: way from Canada down to Argentina. Rowland wanted to know
Speaker 5: can you tell us anything about owls and folklore and mythology.
Speaker 5: I think they were considered a death omen in Welsh folklore,
Speaker 5: but they'd love to know how different cultures view them
Speaker 5: and Joyful Spitfire Bennett Vanderback, Genna Congden, Klure, Ted Vissia
Speaker 5: and adds the Erminologist. So many people wanted to know
Speaker 5: about culture and owls.
Speaker 6: You know, I anticipated this question, and so from my
Speaker 6: own experience, I know that's true because my wife and
Speaker 6: I travel a lot. You go to Africa and people
Speaker 6: are very adverse to owls. It's a funny way I
Speaker 6: discovered this initially in that I always try to buy
Speaker 6: a little owl carving somewhere that's local, and I just
Speaker 6: can't find them in Africa. You know, may in South
Speaker 6: Africa can, but you Ganda, Ghana, it's not going to happen. Well,
Speaker 6: I mean you might be able to find him, but
Speaker 6: it's difficult, and so I did quite a bit of reading,
Speaker 6: and I realized that the literature and the examples are
Speaker 6: so extensive that it's almost mind boggling. But the way
Speaker 6: I think we can handle this is to look at
Speaker 6: some examples. In a cave in southern France, Chave Cave,
Speaker 6: a famous cave where there these early cave drawings of
Speaker 6: homin ens of early people that date back to about
Speaker 6: thirty thousand years. There is an owl painted on the wall.
Speaker 6: And the interesting thing about that owl is that its
Speaker 6: head shows the your rotation. How does it do that
Speaker 6: because they just basically you can see the stripes going
Speaker 6: down the back of the owl and the head is
Speaker 6: turned around and facing the eyes or facing you. And
Speaker 6: so they recognized that this was unique even back then,
Speaker 6: and again because of that, I think that head twisting
Speaker 6: is one of the reasons why they some people might
Speaker 6: have think of them as sinister, because you know, the
Speaker 6: poulter Geist a little kids, you know, heads swimming around,
Speaker 6: and that's like the owl, you know, reversing it.
Speaker 5: And no, I know, my horror babies, it didn't happen
Speaker 5: in Poltergeist that I know of. But Rocky is referring
Speaker 5: to the poltergeist kind of demon entity in the Exorcism
Speaker 5: that swibbled Linda Blair's young tender head around like a
Speaker 5: lazy Susan. But of course it is inherently eerie for
Speaker 5: any kind of animal to do this, like the visual
Speaker 5: of a turntable cabasa. And we've seen what cinophiles called
Speaker 5: the exorcist head trope in everything from Shrek to Beetle Juice.
Speaker 5: It's in the Lego movie, it's in Winnie the Pooh.
Speaker 5: But you can also witness this surreal horror in sloths,
Speaker 5: which can rotate. There's around two hundred and seventy degrees
Speaker 5: and little cuties called tarsiars which look like a labooboo
Speaker 5: with a broken neck. Oh, and of course the owls.
Speaker 6: And in early our aboriginal cave drawings in Australia, owls
Speaker 6: have been a part of mythology of humans for a
Speaker 6: long time. And then you go into the early literature
Speaker 6: of civilizations and Jewish mythology, for example, that the owl
Speaker 6: is so shaded with Lenith, the presumed wife of Adam,
Speaker 6: and the owl is often associated with her as a
Speaker 6: force of darkness or evil or screech owl nighttime, and
Speaker 6: other religions like Hindus have a more positive view of
Speaker 6: owls because often you'll see various gods writing owls as
Speaker 6: their banaha, their transport animal. And then you look at
Speaker 6: in European cultures they mentioned Welsh culture that you see
Speaker 6: through time that perceptions of owls has changed. At times
Speaker 6: they're viewed as bad and these change to where they
Speaker 6: view them positively. And I think it all has to
Speaker 6: do with the fact that here's a creature that spends
Speaker 6: its time at night moving around, makes all kinds of
Speaker 6: weird noises. You know, if you listen to some of them,
Speaker 6: they're just totally bizarre, uh sounding little guys like that
Speaker 6: little long whiskered owlt. The philo plumes are these special
Speaker 6: feathers they have around their beaks so that they can
Speaker 6: feel things that are close because there's far sighted owls
Speaker 6: and they can't see things very close to them, so
Speaker 6: they actually feel the prey with their little feathers on
Speaker 6: their face. And they have a sound that something like this,
Speaker 6: and when they're making that sound, you know, you're going,
Speaker 6: what is this weird thing? And of course the barn
Speaker 6: owls are famous and when people who probably in early
Speaker 6: human history were living in trees or hiding out in caves,
Speaker 6: or I mean spending the night in trees because if
Speaker 6: they are on the ground that got eight or they
Speaker 6: built a campfire to ward off critters. You can see
Speaker 6: why this attachment to something sinister or evil might happen.
Speaker 6: Many many cultures feel that if you hear an owl,
Speaker 6: somebody's going to die or something's bad's going to happen.
Speaker 6: And when you think about it, when somebody dies at night,
Speaker 6: likely the only thing that you're going to hear in
Speaker 6: terms of an animal sound is some mammals screeching or
Speaker 6: an owl, because if a person dies in the daytime,
Speaker 6: there's all kinds of birds singing, and so there's not
Speaker 6: a particular focus. This is all speculation on my part,
Speaker 6: of course, but this is what I'm trying to distill.
Speaker 6: This amazing literature. If you look at books on owls,
Speaker 6: there's almost always a culture chapter about all these different
Speaker 6: specific examples. So it's pretty amazing how different these things are.
Speaker 6: One example that hit home to me was, since I
Speaker 6: have done a lot of work in New Mexico on owls,
Speaker 6: on the Mexican spotted owl, I one time asked permission
Speaker 6: from the Mascalero Apaches if I could catch owls on
Speaker 6: their land, and they looked at me like, you know,
Speaker 6: they just were silent, and I went, yeah, something going on,
Speaker 6: and they said, you can come on the land to
Speaker 6: do your wildlife work. Do not tell us what you
Speaker 6: found out. We don't want to know. We don't want
Speaker 6: to know there's owls there. We don't want to know anything.
Speaker 6: And so I did. When I saw him after I left,
Speaker 6: I was quite successful, and they said how is your trip?
Speaker 6: And I said very nice. I said, lots of deer,
Speaker 6: lots of bears, elk. I didn't mention now out of
Speaker 6: respect for them, because you know they But on the
Speaker 6: other just a couple of hundred miles away is the
Speaker 6: Zuni Pueblo, and the Zunis view owls as a source
Speaker 6: of wisdom and their good omens. And of course the
Speaker 6: Zuni are famous for their owl fetish carvings, so they
Speaker 6: make fetishes of all sorts of animals, and each of
Speaker 6: the animals conveys a different sense of being to the Zuni,
Speaker 6: and the owls that they carve are just absolutely spectacular.
Speaker 6: So my study area was right almost adjacent to the
Speaker 6: Zuni Reservation and Zuni Peblo, and I'd always go by
Speaker 6: there and visit them, and made friends with one individual
Speaker 6: in particular.
Speaker 5: Also, I feel like, excuse me, owl fetish, while there
Speaker 5: are persnas that are technically like featheries. This is not
Speaker 5: the episode on sexual or creative expression. We don't think
Speaker 5: shame anyway. But the original notion of a fetish means
Speaker 5: a religious or spiritual idol or object like those carved
Speaker 5: so beautifully by the Zunis. And it wasn't until the
Speaker 5: eighteen hundreds that fetish was also known as like a
Speaker 5: fascination with an object or a person as an object. Again,
Speaker 5: that's a different episode. But while we're getting entomological, Yes,
Speaker 5: strigoformes and strigopormology do share a root with strega, which
Speaker 5: is Italian for which, and it stems from the word
Speaker 5: for female evil spirit or nocturnal creepiness, which came from
Speaker 5: stricts for owl. And here we are, so yeah, one
Speaker 5: word can mean a lot of things. One bird can
Speaker 5: also mean a lot of things. So Patron Haley Kay,
Speaker 5: who asked how did owls become both a symbol of
Speaker 5: knowledge and a harbinger of doom when they're just little
Speaker 5: goofy guys, and also Patron's Talia dunyak Lori b Kiely
Speaker 5: Schavez barn owl tattooed JC asked about this, they wrote
Speaker 5: in to say that they are yelling at the top
Speaker 5: of their lungs with enthusiasm about owl episodes, So I
Speaker 5: hope that gives you some insight into that. Kelly Shaver
Speaker 5: also wrote in saying I've been told never to post
Speaker 5: pictures of owls online without a content warning because of
Speaker 5: their place in some Native American cultures. And on that note,
Speaker 5: there's a scene in the wonderful series Reservation Dogs where
Speaker 5: the main characters are visiting their weird uncle Brownie, who
Speaker 5: has some fake animals in the front yard and.
Speaker 4: I'm goo, ah fuck, hell no, not an owl. Oh
Speaker 4: my god, No, that's not a good sign.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I'm gonna have a hard effect.
Speaker 5: And in this scene, the owl's eyes are pixelated out,
Speaker 5: which is both cautionary it's also hilarious. So great show.
Speaker 5: Highly recommend Preservation Dogs.
Speaker 6: And so this is a long roundabout answer that there's
Speaker 6: been a long and complicated history with owls, and it's
Speaker 6: changes from time to time, but it can be good
Speaker 6: or evil. And the last example I would use of
Speaker 6: that from my own culture, Hispanic culture of New Mexico,
Speaker 6: is if your audience are interested in Hispanic literature, there's
Speaker 6: a wonderful book written by Rudolpho Anaya called bless Me Ultima.
Speaker 6: There was even a movie made by it.
Speaker 4: I knew there would be something between us.
Speaker 2: Comes the controversial book that was banned forbidden.
Speaker 6: And in that they're the Ultima as a kuranderta and
Speaker 6: her symbol was the owl. But the owl can also
Speaker 6: in Hispanic culture be something that is a bad omen
Speaker 6: So it just depends on how the owl with the
Speaker 6: context of the owl within the situation and who's wielding
Speaker 6: it and so forth. And so it's a complicated situation
Speaker 6: and something that's really interesting to read about. And if
Speaker 6: you get a chance to read some owl books and
Speaker 6: you'll see you'll find great stories and really nice analyzes
Speaker 6: of different examples from all over the world and through time.
Speaker 5: So in a moment we'll continue your questions, which cover
Speaker 5: everything from millennial fashion to the species and political wars
Speaker 5: of modern day owls. But first let's donate to a
Speaker 5: of the ologists choosing and for part one, Rocky chose
Speaker 5: International Owl Center, but for this part too, he chose
Speaker 5: North Coast Environmental Center, which was founded in nineteen seventy one.
Speaker 5: They've been proudly providing quality environmental journalism for decades through
Speaker 5: their monthly publication of Econews and their weekly econews Report
Speaker 5: radio show. And they have been an original litigant in
Speaker 5: lawsuits to save two keystone species. They've allied with indigenous
Speaker 5: tribes to stop construction and the desecration of sacred indigenous
Speaker 5: high country. They've pioneered an international event, Coastal Cleanup Day,
Speaker 5: and a huge list of other achievements, and you can
Speaker 5: find out more at your nc dot org, which will
Speaker 5: link in the show notes. And that donation was made
Speaker 5: possible by sponsors of the show. Okay, let's get into
Speaker 5: a topic that is paramount in the global discussion of
Speaker 5: owls and you know, anthropologically, I don't know if you
Speaker 5: know this, but the Joyful Spitfire and ad zerreminologists mentioned
Speaker 5: that owl pendants were very popular among millennial women in
Speaker 5: the era of eleven to twenty fifteen. It was a
Speaker 5: fashion fad and people are afraid that it will come
Speaker 5: back to haunt us because if you look at bigtures
Speaker 5: of girls right after the twenty tens Wow, there are
Speaker 5: a lot of owl pendants. Everyone was wearing them. So
Speaker 5: I'm gonna have to go back and look from an
Speaker 5: anthropological lens why there were owl pendants everywhere. Let me
Speaker 5: read you the opening graph of an April twenty twenty
Speaker 5: five article on the website Mama Mia ominously titled Millennials,
Speaker 5: the latest relic of your twenty ten wardrobe is back,
Speaker 5: and it reads there was a moment in the mid
Speaker 5: ninties when absolutely everyone was wearing an owl necklace. It
Speaker 5: was the height of the boho trend. Celebrities were teeming
Speaker 5: empire line dresses with low rise jeans, and the accessory
Speaker 5: of choice was a big metal bird around your neck
Speaker 5: with beady black eyes and a tail that fluttered when
Speaker 5: you moved. And honestly, we've been through so much in
Speaker 5: twenty twenty five, I don't know if I can handle
Speaker 5: the resurgence of an owl necklace. It hasn't been long enough,
Speaker 5: it's too fresh. Also, we've already experienced it like a
Speaker 5: second COVID infection. The owl necklaces first hatched in the
Speaker 5: nineteen seventies as part of a respectable tidal wave of
Speaker 5: boho animal accessories. But in the twenty tens it was
Speaker 5: too much. I went down too many owl tunnels. But
Speaker 5: I did find a two thousand and five video of
Speaker 5: Lady Gaga wearing one as an unknown brunette singing cover
Speaker 5: songs to an apathetic crowd. And then there was a
Speaker 5: big hubbub a few years later when one of the
Speaker 5: Real Housewives started mass producing and selling them. There were
Speaker 5: knockoffs of knockoffs of knockoffs, there were lawsuits. There was
Speaker 5: no shortage of forever twenty one owl necklaces that would
Speaker 5: pair perfectly with jeans and a going out top. And
Speaker 5: I'm not ready to go there again. Let's just move on.
Speaker 5: Let's heal from the first round. A couple more listener
Speaker 5: questions if I can. You did some absolutely exceptional hooting,
Speaker 5: which I knew that you were going to be good
Speaker 5: at hooting, and Valerie left.
Speaker 4: A message, this is Vowerie. I was camping last night,
Speaker 4: my hair not one, but three barred owls above my tent,
Speaker 4: talking away last night with the hoo cooks for you
Speaker 4: and other sounds.
Speaker 5: So Valerie wanted to know how owls are as parents,
Speaker 5: which we covered in Part one. But on the topic
Speaker 5: of those barred owls, many of you had questions about
Speaker 5: barred owl versus spotted owl populations, such as Sarah Rosso
Speaker 5: Crawl One, Oscar Chertain and Horrible Lisa Gorman, Marika, Melissa, Mark, Siena,
Speaker 5: Miranda Pana, Matt Thompson, Bonnie and Rutherford, Clayton, Rutger, Donielle
Speaker 5: and Fiona and also Aaron Ryan from Vancouver said, we.
Speaker 8: Have a long intured history of spotted owl management and
Speaker 8: I think we're down to something like one or two
Speaker 8: individuals left in the wild, and I'm just wondering how
Speaker 8: badly have we fucked up and are they ever going
Speaker 8: to come back?
Speaker 5: But I wanted to ask about barred owls and spotted
Speaker 5: owls and if you could give us your take and
Speaker 5: your history what's going on with bart owls and spotted owls.
Speaker 6: First of all, let me give you your audience the
Speaker 6: hoots for these two ols, so that if they're ever
Speaker 6: out anywhere on the in the West Coast States in
Speaker 6: your camping, like your caller mentioned, they'll be able to
Speaker 6: recognize the different. So the bard owl sounds like this,
Speaker 6: who cooks for you, who cooks for you all? Who
Speaker 6: cooks for you? Who cooks for you all? And the
Speaker 6: spotted owl is different. It's a series of four notes. Oh,
Speaker 6: and so these calls are distinguishable between those two species.
Speaker 6: The hypothesis is, and of course it can never be proved,
Speaker 6: but that's sort of them material. With a change the
Speaker 6: settlement of the Midwestern United States and the exclusion of fire,
Speaker 6: there's been the development of riparian forests along the streams,
Speaker 6: planting of woodlands forests in what otherwise grassland. And the bards,
Speaker 6: which are native to the eastern United States, has moved
Speaker 6: westward over the past one hundred or so years into Canada,
Speaker 6: Northern Canada, Manitoba, British Columbia, and then south through Washington, Oregon,
Speaker 6: and California. But the barn owl is bigger and more
Speaker 6: aggressive of and a dominant owl, and so they actually
Speaker 6: drive the spotted owl out of their territories and sometimes
Speaker 6: it will kill them. So over the past thirty years
Speaker 6: we've seen a well, there's been two declines of spotted owls,
Speaker 6: one related to the loss of old grill forest habitat
Speaker 6: and the other do the invasion of the l we stabilized.
Speaker 6: I'm saying, we know people in conservation has stabilized this
Speaker 6: through creation of forest reserves and restrictions on logging of
Speaker 6: old forests, and then guidance the private landowners to maintain
Speaker 6: certain characteristics of forests so that the owls that they
Speaker 6: have will be maintained there.
Speaker 5: And we go into more detail on forestry management with
Speaker 5: doctor Gavin Jones in the fire Ecology episode and with
Speaker 5: doctor Amy Christensen in her Indigenous fire Ecology episode on
Speaker 5: what she calls good fire. But this spotted owl species,
Speaker 5: as we mentioned in part one, is this hugely political
Speaker 5: issue that was essentially conservationists versus loggers, like tree huggers
Speaker 5: versus capitalists, animal people versus industry. It came down to
Speaker 5: this really bifurcated political debate, and the spotted owl became
Speaker 5: this canary and a coal mine kind of species that
Speaker 5: helped curb an unsustainable timber industry to preserve a lot
Speaker 5: of these forests and a lot of the ecology. So
Speaker 5: that's the good news at.
Speaker 6: Least that's sort of been stabilized. But now that this
Speaker 6: barred owl is invading the range of the spotted owl
Speaker 6: and displacing them and killing them, and they incurred it
Speaker 6: much higher densities. It's almost inevitable that they're going to
Speaker 6: cause them to go extinct. And the only way that
Speaker 6: we have determined, and I say we this is scientists
Speaker 6: in general have determined that this is going to be
Speaker 6: stopped is to remove the barred owls, and that has
Speaker 6: caused a great deal of backlash from animal welfare groups because,
Speaker 6: let's face it, I mean, most people in the United
Speaker 6: States love owls, including all the people that are a
Speaker 6: scientists and conservationists that are in favor of removing bardele.
Speaker 6: Nobody wants to kill a barn owl, but if you
Speaker 6: are going to maintain spotted owls, you're going to have
Speaker 6: to remove bard howls. And it's much more than just
Speaker 6: the bard owl. This large owl has four times the
Speaker 6: density that spotted owls do, so they're eating a lot
Speaker 6: more small mammal prey and their diet is very different
Speaker 6: from the spotted owls. You can consider the spotted owl
Speaker 6: as specialist in that their primary prayer flying squirrels and
Speaker 6: wood rats, and they take around red tree bowls and
Speaker 6: some mice and the like. But those two pray make
Speaker 6: up eighty percent of their diet, whereas the bard al
Speaker 6: they eat everything. They eat all those plus they eat salamanders.
Speaker 6: They'll even take fish and insects and birds and you
Speaker 6: name it. They eat just about everything. And in fact,
Speaker 6: we think that they're eating so many things and because
Speaker 6: there's high density, that they're going to have serious negative
Speaker 6: effects on many other species as well. An unpublished study
Speaker 6: that was just recently completed has shown that there's at
Speaker 6: least thirty species that conservations consider species of special conservation
Speaker 6: concern that are being eaten by bard owls. Oh that's
Speaker 6: a lot. And we already have direct evidence of extinction
Speaker 6: of screech owls on an Island and Huget Sound. Around
Speaker 6: my house, I have not heard a screech owl or
Speaker 6: a pigmy owl for ten years, and I've got three
Speaker 6: pairs of barn owls. So it goes on and on
Speaker 6: that there's this cascade effect that this has caused. And
Speaker 6: we've shown through research again we in the general sense,
Speaker 6: we've shown through research that it is easy to remove
Speaker 6: barn owls from certain places, more difficult to other places,
Speaker 6: but it can be done and it's cost effective to
Speaker 6: do it as well. Yet, because they are owls, and
Speaker 6: because killing is involved, there's been a backlash. It's almost
Speaker 6: analogous to what we see with politics in today's world.
Speaker 6: Its euphemistic form is the bullshit asymmetry principle, which means
Speaker 6: that the amount of effort it takes to countervail misleading
Speaker 6: or lies is much greater than telling the lie or
Speaker 6: putting out the misleading information. And so we've had that
Speaker 6: with with the Bardel in which certain groups have continue
Speaker 6: to say the same thing that it's impossible to do this.
Speaker 6: It is, you know, a massive slaughter, and it will
Speaker 6: be a large number of ls that'll be better be taken.
Speaker 6: But once you get the situation under a reasonable control,
Speaker 6: it's a sort of a maintenance situation that will occur.
Speaker 5: And at twenty twenty four New York Times article bearing
Speaker 5: the headline they shoot owls in California, Don't They explains
Speaker 5: that northern spotted owl populations have declined by up to
Speaker 5: eighty percent over the past two decades. It reads, in
Speaker 5: the wilds of British Columbia, the northern spotted owl has vanished.
Speaker 5: Only one a female remains. If the trend continues, it says,
Speaker 5: the northern spotted owl could become the first owl subspecies
Speaker 5: in the United States to go extinct, and it goes
Speaker 5: on to describe that in response to conservationist plans to
Speaker 5: cull the barred owl while rebuilding more spotted owl habitat,
Speaker 5: seventy five animal organizations signed a letter urging the federal
Speaker 5: agency to drop the plan to cull the bard owls.
Speaker 5: Now Rocky, interviewed in the New York Times article, said,
Speaker 5: it's apparent to me that the seventy five authors of
Speaker 5: that letter either did not understand the plan or they
Speaker 5: didn't read it carefully. If people complain about the cost
Speaker 5: and feasibility of fifteen thousand birds removed per year, the
Speaker 5: price tag for translocation would probably send them into cardiac arrest.
Speaker 5: And Rocky continued to say, besides being two time consuming,
Speaker 5: where would you relocate the owls to no one wants them.
Speaker 5: You can let nature take its course, he added, but
Speaker 5: that course would be extinction for the spotted owl.
Speaker 6: Now.
Speaker 5: One of Rocky's colleagues, Eric Forceman, was quoted as saying,
Speaker 5: is there some point at which we simply admit that
Speaker 5: we have screwed things up so badly that there's no
Speaker 5: going back to the good old days. Eric said, I'm
Speaker 5: torn apart by this dilemma, and I find it difficult
Speaker 5: to get mad at anyone on either side of the argument.
Speaker 5: And Rocky wrote to me and noted that this article
Speaker 5: really seemed to have an agenda, it was biased against
Speaker 5: the science of conservation, and The New York Times also
Speaker 5: did not include his counterpoint, which is is conservation not
Speaker 5: a never ending process? And in twenty nineteen, Rocky addressed
Speaker 5: a Raptor convention on the topic of this dilemma, and
Speaker 5: his address was titled when a conservation conflict comes full circle.
Speaker 5: The spotted owl conflict is a wicked problem, which will
Speaker 5: link in our website. It's a tough topic and it's
Speaker 5: a huge problem to try to undo what humans have
Speaker 5: done to the planet for the last several hundred years.
Speaker 6: But yet the person keeps saying that it's going to
Speaker 6: cost a billion dollars when that's not true at all.
Speaker 6: It's a lie. But you cannot fight this continual amount
Speaker 6: of information, So the public in general, I think has
Speaker 6: been misled. The LA Times, for example, came out with
Speaker 6: an editorial against this control, whereas most mainstream conservation groups
Speaker 6: like American Bird Conservancy, many of the Autumn groups and
Speaker 6: Center for Biological Diversity are in favor of that control
Speaker 6: because not just the effect on the bard owt but
Speaker 6: the effect that all the other owls, plus all these
Speaker 6: other species that are being killed by the bard owl.
Speaker 6: So it's really, you know, as I published a paper
Speaker 6: one time, it's a wickud problem this and the fire
Speaker 6: issue that Gavin Jones talked to you about before with
Speaker 6: the owls. So that is it in a nutshell. It's
Speaker 6: just sort of a long story, but it is clear
Speaker 6: what we think the answer is. It's a matter of
Speaker 6: whether people are willing to accept this. But the consequence
Speaker 6: of not excipting it is that you have to be
Speaker 6: willing to lose all your many of your small owls,
Speaker 6: many of the other endangered species, and the spotted owl.
Speaker 5: So what do we do?
Speaker 6: And to me, I think the choice is clear because
Speaker 6: you have the bard owl is very widespread all over
Speaker 6: eastern North America and it's an invader in a sense here.
Speaker 6: Whether that's naturalists they try to claim we're unnatural owing
Speaker 6: to the effects of humans, to me, that's the material.
Speaker 6: It is a choice that we're going to make, and
Speaker 6: the thing of it is that we make these choices
Speaker 6: as humans all the time. We can rodents and rats
Speaker 6: and things that we don't like, species that affect crops,
Speaker 6: and people say, while you're playing god, well now we're
Speaker 6: playing human. Really, you know, we're looking after our own
Speaker 6: self interest, and if our self interest is in maintaining
Speaker 6: biodiversity and the species that we've come to know and love,
Speaker 6: then this choice is clear to me.
Speaker 5: I was thinking about that today because I have an
Speaker 5: ant bait in my shower right now and telling my husband,
Speaker 5: I was like, I'm going to go take a shower
Speaker 5: with four thousand of my closest friends, and you know,
Speaker 5: there are an invasive species, this particular kind of ant
Speaker 5: down here displacing harvesters, and I don't have an issue
Speaker 5: with putting an ant bait down. And a lot of
Speaker 5: people probably have rodent bait in their backyard without even
Speaker 5: thinking about it. And it's interesting that when the species
Speaker 5: becomes very charismatic, then that's when people start to speak up.
Speaker 5: But you know, life for life and how many downstream
Speaker 5: effects aren't considered in that management. But I mean, so
Speaker 5: many people who know wildlife scientists know that they're conservationists
Speaker 5: and that they're maintaining balance to counter effect what humans
Speaker 5: have imbalanced is part of wildlife conservation that you have
Speaker 5: to accept what humans have done and try to counteract it.
Speaker 5: You mentioned also rodenticides, and last listener question in general
Speaker 5: is sort of like what can we do to help owls?
Speaker 5: A lot of people wanted to know me, like Emily Knudsom,
Speaker 5: Aaron Farley, It's Hutchins, Cali Tiger, Udy Stratford, Abbott Iris
Speaker 5: wanted to know about rat poisons and Emily says, big
Speaker 5: up vote for discussing rat poisons. What can we do
Speaker 5: to help owls in general? And can we start with
Speaker 5: not putting out rat poisons?
Speaker 6: Absolutely? So the issue of rat poison is a big one,
Speaker 6: and rat poison has been used for a long time
Speaker 6: around people's houses and they've used it and agriculture and
Speaker 6: rodent poision not just rat poison but rodent poison because
Speaker 6: of damage to crops. And one of the things about
Speaker 6: that is that these small mammals that are the target organisms,
Speaker 6: they eat that and they accumulate it in them and
Speaker 6: then they die and then other species eat them and
Speaker 6: then they get the rat poison, and so there's a
Speaker 6: secondary poisoning effect, and now that we have marijuana growing
Speaker 6: virtually everywhere in California that it is a huge, huge
Speaker 6: problem for wildlife. Studies have been done, for example, as
Speaker 6: a result of removing these bardels, scientists have actually looked
Speaker 6: at the secondary poisoning and the bardales that are collected
Speaker 6: or removed, shot and removed from these spotted out territories
Speaker 6: and they show something like over eighty percent secondary poisoning.
Speaker 6: So it's getting into everything. I mean, all these raptors
Speaker 6: that are picking them, anything that's going to eat, a
Speaker 6: carry on is going to pick them up. And I've
Speaker 6: seen pictures of bears with their faces covered with these
Speaker 6: really toxic anticoagulant poisons that the bears have rated some
Speaker 6: pot farmers illegal camp and gotten this stuff all over
Speaker 6: their face. And they're going to die. I mean, it's
Speaker 6: allly a matter of time before they're going to die.
Speaker 6: So it's a very serious problem. And what I would
Speaker 6: recommend is people do not use rat poison. They either
Speaker 6: trap the rats or make every effort to try to
Speaker 6: exclude the rats from where they are, eliminate their food
Speaker 6: that they're coming around to try to get close up
Speaker 6: your house as best you can and so forth. So
Speaker 6: just avoid rat poison. That's the big thing, because it's
Speaker 6: a serious problem.
Speaker 5: I was like, why weed farms, and I looked into it,
Speaker 5: and yeah, they like the seeds and the stems and
Speaker 5: the seed links. But no, I know what you're thinking,
Speaker 5: because I was thinking it too. And researchers say that
Speaker 5: the rats are not binge watching Vivis and Buttthead on
Speaker 5: YouTube or microwaving a bunch of tiquitos. They're not getting stoned.
Speaker 5: You got to have heat on that. THHC experts say,
Speaker 5: But yes, if they are eating your crops or your drugs,
Speaker 5: don't poison them for the owl's sake.
Speaker 6: Other things that you can do is, of course, nest boxes.
Speaker 6: Owls will use the nest boxes. Try to be helpful
Speaker 6: in terms of the way you have your if you're
Speaker 6: lucky enough to have a yard and you have ornamental plants,
Speaker 6: grow plants that have food sources so that you know,
Speaker 6: squirrels or other things that'll eat those fruits, and then
Speaker 6: that'll attract other birds plus raptors and owls. So you know,
Speaker 6: try to do what you can to make your little
Speaker 6: part of nature to help owls.
Speaker 5: What about can you make friends with an owl. If
Speaker 5: I see an owl and it's hooting, say, my great
Speaker 5: horned friends, If I say to it, do they say,
Speaker 5: who are you? Get out of here? Or do they say,
Speaker 5: what's that? Buddy? Can you hoo back at it?
Speaker 8: Now?
Speaker 6: Yeah? You can. I don't encourage that. The main thing
Speaker 6: is that the owls. You have to remember why the
Speaker 6: owls are hooting. They're hooting to make contact with their mate.
Speaker 6: They're hooting to defend their territory. Oftentimes, if they're defending
Speaker 6: the territory and they're on the nest and you hoot
Speaker 6: to them and you agitate that male that's defending the territory,
Speaker 6: you very well might call the female off the nest
Speaker 6: to join the male and the defense of the territory.
Speaker 6: And then the young are exposed to predation in the
Speaker 6: nest or to the weather, and so it's important that
Speaker 6: you really don't do that. I mean, birders are notoriously
Speaker 6: bad for wanting to do this, and I mean I
Speaker 6: understand it. Everybody wants to see owls, but you have
Speaker 6: to be very very judicious about calling owls and try
Speaker 6: to do it not in the primary part of the
Speaker 6: nesting season, but in the in the non nesting season,
Speaker 6: or or right at the edges, when you know, the
Speaker 6: younger out of the nest and are able to take
Speaker 6: care of themselves. And and in fact, when I travel
Speaker 6: places and I've seen an owl for a particular species, I
Speaker 6: don't call it, even though I'd really love to see it,
Speaker 6: I just don't do it, okay, because I know that
Speaker 6: other birders are around there trying to see those those
Speaker 6: owls as well, and and I just figure it's my
Speaker 6: tiny contribution to, you know, reducing harassment of these these birds.
Speaker 5: Oh that's good to know. So when I hear and
Speaker 5: see my local owls, I can maybe stand or my breath. Hello,
Speaker 5: I like you, and that's plenty.
Speaker 6: Yeah, Oh they could probably hear that. I trust me.
Speaker 6: They have incredible hearings. It's a hundred times better than us,
Speaker 6: you know. And as an example in southern California, my
Speaker 6: sister Angela lives in a little town called a Highlands
Speaker 6: out on the base of the sam Bordaninos, and we
Speaker 6: were sitting in her She lives on the edge of
Speaker 6: this arroyo, and I saw a barn aw at dusk
Speaker 6: Land about one hundred and fifty two hundred meters away
Speaker 6: from it, which is a fair distance. And she said, oh,
Speaker 6: did you see that owl? I said yeah. I said,
Speaker 6: you want to see it closer? And she said, oh,
Speaker 6: come on, you can't bring it closer, and I want
Speaker 6: to watch this, and I went, I made that sound
Speaker 6: of a mouse, and that thing came right to my head.
Speaker 6: And that's the old hat trick, right. It came right
Speaker 6: over the top of my head, my duck, and it
Speaker 6: landed right behind me. And then that bird heard me
Speaker 6: from one hundred and fifty two hundred yards away, So
Speaker 6: even that little tiny they may hear you, so.
Speaker 5: Oh my gosh, I'll keep my mouth shut. And Rocky
Speaker 5: later sent me a sweet, wonderful note apologizing for being
Speaker 5: harsh about it, which he was not in any way.
Speaker 5: But he also said that the American Birding Association has
Speaker 5: a code of conduct, which we'll link in our site,
Speaker 5: about when it is okay to vocalize toward an owl.
Speaker 5: And so now, when I hear owls hooting, especially those
Speaker 5: lovely nights when a pair is hooting at each other
Speaker 5: to reinforce their bond, which is like exactly what's happening
Speaker 5: when you're talking to someone and you can't stop texting
Speaker 5: back and forth. I will stay out of it. That's
Speaker 5: not my place. So that's so good to know. Thank
Speaker 5: you Rocky for helping me not freak out the people
Speaker 5: I love who are sometimes owls. I always ask your
Speaker 5: least favorite and your favorite thing about what you do.
Speaker 5: What is the hardest part about studying owls? Is it
Speaker 5: the conservation part? Is it staying up too late?
Speaker 6: Well, I mean for me, it has really been the
Speaker 6: conservation conflict aspect of it, because almost invariably most spotted
Speaker 6: owl experts get involved to a degree with conservation conflicts
Speaker 6: or the owl conflict. But I've taken it to a
Speaker 6: different level in the sense that I got really interested
Speaker 6: in this mainly because I have a very good colleague
Speaker 6: and friend from the University of Aberdeen, Stephen Redpath, who
Speaker 6: came out to visit me as a post doc, and
Speaker 6: I took him around to our study area and we
Speaker 6: got to be really good friends, and we started collaborating
Speaker 6: on conservation conflicts, thinking about the general theory of it
Speaker 6: and why people make the decisions they do, and how
Speaker 6: do you resolve conflicts and what are the key issues
Speaker 6: involved here? When I get involved in I just see
Speaker 6: how intractable it is and it's very discouraging, but it's
Speaker 6: almost like a microcosm of our politics today. Or do
Speaker 6: you see this constant barrage of misinformation in outright lies?
Speaker 6: And again you know that bullshitt asymmetry principle comes in there,
Speaker 6: and it's very difficult to deal with that. You can
Speaker 6: defeat them in the scientific arena, but it doesn't make
Speaker 6: any difference if they're winning in the public arena. They're
Speaker 6: experts at this, they're experts at at social media, they're
Speaker 6: experts at communicating with people and reaching politicians, and scientists
Speaker 6: aren't trained to do that. And I think that's the
Speaker 6: greatest frustration that there is to me.
Speaker 5: So yes, when people use scientific sounding language to mislead
Speaker 5: the public about what the experts are actually saying, that
Speaker 5: really gets his goat understandably. Clearly, Rocky and his owl
Speaker 5: expert colleagues have dedicated their lives to the survival of
Speaker 5: threatened species. What about your favorite part about studying owls
Speaker 5: or a favorite owl or a moment in your owl
Speaker 5: history that sticks out for you.
Speaker 6: Well, my favorite owl, of course is the spotted owl,
Speaker 6: because of you know, I've gotten to know it so well.
Speaker 6: But the owl I wanted to see most in the
Speaker 6: world was a long whiskered owl. It's a little, tiny
Speaker 6: owl set probably the second smallest owl in the world.
Speaker 6: Is a weird little guy and lives an elfin forests
Speaker 6: in the andes of Peru. They're about the size of
Speaker 6: your hand you put up your hand, a little teeny things.
Speaker 6: But really the most satisfying thing to me, and what
Speaker 6: has made this probably the most wonderful part of the journey,
Speaker 6: is the students that I've worked with, you know, seeing
Speaker 6: how they have thought of a problem, solved it, gone out.
Speaker 6: They've done the hard work, created something wonderful and gone
Speaker 6: on and had a fantastic career. And I just, I
Speaker 6: just I felt that that was the penultimate reward for
Speaker 6: all of the work on the owls.
Speaker 5: Oh, that's so sweet to hear. And people who talk
Speaker 5: about you behind your back, People say the sweetest things
Speaker 5: about you, and that you're just such an icon and
Speaker 5: a mentor. People gush about you behind your back. So
Speaker 5: whether or not you're good at taking compliments, just know
Speaker 5: that you're very beloved in the bird community and especially
Speaker 5: the owl community. But Rocky, this is even better than
Speaker 5: I imagined I have been begging you to come on
Speaker 5: this show for weeks and weeks and weeks. It was
Speaker 5: even better than imagined.
Speaker 6: Yeah, well the best. I appreciate that. I was looking
Speaker 6: forward to it myself.
Speaker 5: Thank you for making my dream come true and letting
Speaker 5: me talk to you about owls for a couple hours.
Speaker 6: That's fine, I can. I can talk about all owls
Speaker 6: all the time here.
Speaker 5: All day, and I guess all night too. So once again,
Speaker 5: ask visionary people some blurry questions. And thank you so
Speaker 5: much again to RJ. Rocky Gutierres for being on not
Speaker 5: just this week, but last week as well. We have
Speaker 5: links in the show notes to find out more about Rocky,
Speaker 5: and of course we post more research on our website
Speaker 5: at aliward dot com, slash ologies, slash striggo formology, and
Speaker 5: after part one aired, Rocky mentioned his wonderful wife in
Speaker 5: a note writing to me. I also found out KT
Speaker 5: is almost as shy as me. She was embarrassed that
Speaker 5: I praised her talent, but I told her she should
Speaker 5: never be embarrassed because I am not shy about expressing
Speaker 5: my love for her, So she settled down after that.
Speaker 5: I never get tired of praising her talents of which
Speaker 5: there are many. Oh, Rocky kt, how lucky we are
Speaker 5: to have you two out here on our little planet
Speaker 5: helping out the owls too. So we are at Ologies
Speaker 5: on Instagram and Blue Sky. I'm at Aliward on both
Speaker 5: smologies are shorter kid friendly episodes available wherever you find podcasts,
Speaker 5: just search SMO l Ogies. Ologies merch has totes and
Speaker 5: hats and shirts. Thank you to patrons at patri on
Speaker 5: dot com slash Ologies for supporting the show. They also
Speaker 5: get first stims on tickets for live shows, which is
Speaker 5: another perk for a dollar a month. Thank you to
Speaker 5: Aaron Talbert, who admin Theology's podcast Facebook group. Aveline Malik
Speaker 5: makes our professional transcripts. Kelly R. Dwyer does a website
Speaker 5: once again. Nocturnal and Diurnal scheduling producer is well Dilworth.
Speaker 5: Our eagle eyed managing director is Susan Hale, and the
Speaker 5: pair of editors sharing the branch is Jake Chafe and
Speaker 5: lead editor Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio. Nick Thorburn hooted
Speaker 5: out the theme music and if you stick around until
Speaker 5: the very end, you know I may tell you a secret.
Speaker 5: And this week it's that Yes, according to listeners, I
Speaker 5: can ruin my life by tugging my dongle out of
Speaker 5: a port before ejecting the SD cart. So thank you
Speaker 5: for scaring me straight. I shall never again. Also another secret,
Speaker 5: absolutely bonkers, is that I was working on this episode
Speaker 5: on a plane from Atlanta to Hartford, Connecticut last night
Speaker 5: to go give a talk at Smith College, which I'm
Speaker 5: about to do in an hour or two. And the
Speaker 5: pilot casually said, then, if you look out your window
Speaker 5: on the lift side of the plane, you'll see And
Speaker 5: I was sure he was going to name like some
Speaker 5: bullshit stadium I didn't care about. It was like ten pm.
Speaker 5: I had more writing to do, and he was like,
Speaker 5: you'll see the Northern lights. And I took a glance.
Speaker 5: The horizon was fushut and red and green, and my
Speaker 5: face was pressed to the window and I tapped the
Speaker 5: dude next to me and he said, oh, yeah, I
Speaker 5: was stationed in Alaska for years. You should hear him
Speaker 5: crackle when they move. What I saw the Northern lights
Speaker 5: at a plane window last night. I was like, well,
Speaker 5: that's a little treat, isn't it. And for more on
Speaker 5: the Northern lights and solar storms, you can see the
Speaker 5: Heliology episode from April twenty twenty four, as well as
Speaker 5: the Eclipse field trip episode. Anyway, there I am. I'm
Speaker 5: folded up in an airplane seat. I got mustard on
Speaker 5: my jacket, just crossing off a bucket list item from
Speaker 5: the actual sky, so I'm not mad at that. Also,
Speaker 5: the solar storm may be visible through November fourteenth, just
Speaker 5: in case you're inner region that can see it. Okay,
Speaker 5: good luck, farewell for by Pacaderman College Homeiology, crypto Zoology,
Speaker 5: Lithology and Sechnology, Meteorology and Wold Federatology, Ethnology, seriology, selenology,
Speaker 5: and
Speaker 6: My hat back h