hello everyone and welcome back to conversations with tyler today i'm talking with richard prom of yale university i spotted richard in the field some while ago and classified him as great american ornithologist richard welcome thank you great to be here why is there so much infidelity in australian birds in particular well i you know i don't i don't think that there probably is an extraordinary amount of uh infidelity in australian birds however
there are certainly a number of classic cases of uh the investigation of of multiple mating in in in australian birds or the classic the the the fairy ren's which have a very weird social system including one feature which is uh multiple mating
and how well can we explain why fairy wrens are different in their mating practices right how much explanatory power does ornithology have there we we we need we need we need to talk a little bit about what makes fairy wrens
extraordinary in in other ways fairy wrens live in cooperative groups extended families that include multiple males and females of reproductive age and usually a large number of them are the at least male offspring of previous years that are hanging around helping mom and dad or some adults raise their their their relatives um this probably because uh this probably arises and is very common in australian birds it probably arises because
of a very high habitat variability in particular variability and rainfall as you see already thinking about australia we think a lot about you know that's a drought or not right so under those conditions you never really know
whether you're going to have enough resources to to raise kids another feature is that um the habitat is rich and in some times of the year and so as a result they're kind of packed cheek to jowl so there's no real estate for the
kids to go off to so they stay at home move into the basement and help their parents right until they can inherit the back 40 or take over a bud off if you will into a new territory so that means there's a lot of
reproductive opportunities um between groups but the groups are in separate territory so a lot of uh what happens in these cooperative species like fairy rents that people found out is that the females mate multiply um and that is they can
mate with other members of the of the group besides the the the the mature or most dominant male or uh they can mate with other males in other groups and is it variability of rainfall that makes australian birds weirder
um well there are two cool things about it one is that yes and people have associated uh cooperative breeding this this special variation in the avian family life where you get a cooperative uh behavior among reproductive age individuals with uh
unpredictable rainfall so that's a general phenomenon you find it a lot in different parts of the world and how does the equilibrium work there so rainfall is unpredictable and then what happens solve for the equilibrium so to speak yeah sure sure so uh rainfall is unpredictable uh and and and also the other combination is uh the habitat is is saturated right so there aren't a lot of places to go so what that means is that it's often
more helpful or more useful for for uh for uh individuals to delay dispersal and until their reproductive age and then they're hanging out and then of course they do work and why what they how they benefit is is could be both uh
helping their relatives kin selection or that they they could be gaining experience uh you know direct benefits like learning how to raise a family before they get a chance to do their own is it the case that birds are more
modular in construction than mammals for instance they don't seem to use their wings and legs so much in concert the way mammals might or is that not true well that's really cool thing actually if you go back to the gate
of a crocodile or any tetrapod the front legs and the hind legs were really coupled right and you know you have to do that well but going backs probably in the very long bipedal theropod dinosaurs long history of bipedality and therapeutic dinosaurs
those things had to be uncoupled and it required a lot of rewiring both of the motor movement the brain uh the muscles etc so that's ancient in in the lineage of birds uh think of t-rex with its tiny little uh four limbs very decoupled and then what birds have done in flight is actually to couple the four limbs with the tail uh in flight so we have a part of the axial skeleton right which now becomes in a way related to the flight apparatus
which is which are the four limbs right the front of the wings um so that's a lot of like it basically turns out to be deep deep dino biology that birds are just taking advantage of in flight here's a very stupid question
the intermediate steps towards the evolution of flight why are they efficient so i go through life let's say i didn't have a car i've never woken up and said gee i would love to glide today right gliding serves no purpose for me so how
is it we get to flight in between right why did that persist yeah d you know deep controversy there you could you could there are lots of careers that have been uh thrown on the on the pyre of avian flight origins but uh but in detail um uh there are two theories one is the ground up cursorial theory that somehow you're running and you're running fast enough and you start with maybe movements that help you manipulate as you run and then
finally take off off the ground the other is the arboreal theory or the trees down that you start with gliding and control movements of gliding and then and then eventually to to powered flight um those folks have been warring at it
for you know well almost a century but really really going at it for the last few decades uh and so uh where does this sit now uh the interesting thing is that the uh it used to be that the origin of of uh of uh of birds
was like a a a menu where you had you know column a or column b and column a was you know birds are not related dinosaurs feathers evolved for flight and and flight evolved from the trees down and then the opposite was birds or dinosaurs and column b birds are dinosaurs uh feathers often uh for thermal regulation or for something other than flight and that feather flight of light right from the ground or flight arose or evolved from the ground
and it turns out that the dyno people were correct feathers did not evolve for flight and birds are dinosaurs but uh it turns out that column a was actually right about uh flight uh flight most likely evolved from the trees down and there's a whole
bunch of reasons why starting with gliding like a flying squirrel and then controlling your gliding and then using those control movements to create a flight choke but flying squirrels are not that plentiful right
they're not taking over the world they don't seem to do that well yeah they're they sure as hair are taking over borneo i can tell you uh i know if you man when you go into into the into uh southeast asia there are there are uh forests where uh there are incredibly diverse uh uh gliding mammals of multiple families right so so uh that's probably because the forest is made mostly of dipterocarps which look like really really really
high broccoli you know 30 meters high and so there's a lot of space and why are they flying or are they gliding well to get away from predators or even ultimately they get good enough at it that they can use it to disperse from
tree to tree so the idea is that that's that's how that's how it started of course maybe one of the reasons why uh flying squirrels haven't taken over the world is because they never got to powered flight like like birds did
uh and uh which obviously is going a lot further now according to jennifer ackerman duetting of song occurs in about 16 percent of bird species how well can we explain the cross-sectional variation there um well you know a lot of uh explanation in biology is historical explanation and uh so i don't think that comes out in a regression line but uh you know uh one of the things we see is again social social complexity um in tropical
birds you're much more likely to have pairs that that endure for the whole year right and resident on a territory that kind of long-term social relationship will support duetting um um is it the migratory birds that have lost duetting yeah well most most of the birds that are that that are well uh dweting is still highly concentrated in just a few groups uh songbirds and uh and um you know uh a few and a few other lineages so
there's a lot of things like gulls and and penguins and shorebirds that don't uh that don't have uh due wedding per se but if you were carving up how much of this universe of duetting is explained by historical persistence
and path dependence as opposed to theory what would your proportions be i don't know uh but i'd have to say you know a large amount of it 30 percent 50 percent is is history because a lot of these groups originated like australian birds one of
the interesting things all of songbirds are out of australia right they persisted there for a very long time so there's a lot of lineages with lots of female song and some duetting and complexity in australia and then a few very few
lineages that came out of australia and that kind of uh um uh long history in a place means that you know you're likely to keep something like that or not or not have the opportunity or reason to change it putting path dependence aside if you
were trying to give us the most fundamental explanation of why sexual dimorphism is different in birds compared to mammals what would that be um well uh that's a actually a really big a really big question of course uh well the most fundamental factor what is it yeah well the most fundamental factor is that uh most birds don't have a penis and walk talk me through the equilibrium there well there's a lot there so that's where we start most
birds don't have a penis which means that one of the things that happens in avian evolution um that's distinct from from mammals is that the kids require a lot of care but they also have to they're growing up in the nest right the hatching of egg and but they're very very vulnerable until they can fly so so birds have a very rapid period of uh rapid development and that means that they grow up and leave eggs and you need two
parents to do that efficiently in most diets or most kind of ecologies that means the dad's got to be at the nest right and so we usually thought that um uh that female birds are are um uh or that we usually thought that the that
you have you know social monogamy at least two birds helping raise the young because uh the young are so needy and they you know have to grow up quickly but there's another possibility which is that uh they could evolve to be uh
so needy and grow up quickly because they managed to get males at the nest and one of the things that happened you know in the in the philology of birds you got uh uh um um you know ostriches and their relatives then you
got chickens and ducks and then you got the rest of birds and that's a that's a bunch that's you know the vast majority of them and that in that lineage the leading to the rest of birds the penis uh evolved away and the question is why
and my own theory is that female birds uh preferred mates that did not have a penis uh and one of the ancillary benefits of that one of the correlated benefits of that is that they were no longer subject to sexual
coercion they could be or sexual uh violence they could be coerced behaviorally but they couldn't be forcibly fertilized and that means that they have freedom of choice and what do they do with their freedom of choice if they choose beauty
and so one of the reasons why birds are so beautiful is that males don't have a penis so they have to be subject to choice in order to affect reproduction and also they have to invest if females require it now sometimes albatrosses don't breed until they're 20 years old or even on average maybe it's what 10 years old what are they doing in the meantime that's so important yeah well that is a deep question i actually have a student working on
uh delayed maturation what are they getting better at uh right because life history tells you that you could never there's no upside to delaying reproduction for uh if all things are equal but uh they must be getting better at
something it's a lot of people think it's foraging right that they that um uh raising that one young on an island you know and foraging you know hundreds of miles out of the ocean then returning and this the whole social relationship
uh to raise a an albatross family is is tough uh and so uh being efficient at uh efficient enough to raise may take years to to to to to develop uh you got to get good at foraging before you can raise a baby and certain diets certainly require that
and we have the same thing in many gulls large gulls so it could be a uh that they're getting better at at uh at foraging now one thing i like about ornithology is it has a lot of game theory just like economics does
so sometimes when i read it it feels very familiar so let me ask you whether you all have the same problem that we do with economic theories of signaling once you get past the very simplest model typically there are so many multiple equilibria that theories are hard to test they can predict all kinds of things and you don't know what to do next now does ornithology have the same problem with signaling an extreme of multiple equilibria
yeah well i i think so the question is is that a bug or is that a feature because nature really does look diverse so the idea that there could be multiple equilibria is not a problem for us um or at least for me uh and also as you can tell from a lot
of my answers i'm really interested in in in history itself as uh as uh you know interesting explanatory powers um the other feature though is that um most of my color many of my colleagues in evolutionary biology
have bought the economic line that communication is about efficient exchange of information but there's a lot of things we communicate about that that that isn't about uh information right and and that's been a lot of my work has been on on ornament and and sexual display right and you know the popular idea is that beauty and the sexual attraction in in birds and in nature in general is a kind of uh efficient way to communicate
actionable information about mate quality but the other possibility is that it's merely beautiful uh and and that's you know that it is uh an irrationally exuberant market bubble in a genetic mating market right and uh and that
uh and that they're off the ranch so i am really fascinated by those kinds of communication that are about um persuasion and not about um not about uh information right and uh and so um there are some contexts where of course
you know the that that uh the signaling uh signaling theory is is it applies well but there are plenty of others where where it doesn't here's part of what bugs me so as an economist i see multiple equilibria whether i like them or not i i feel comfortable with it right so you've stressed in your work there's a certain arbitrariness to a lot of aesthetic values in birds and indeed elsewhere but if you just look commonsensically at a lot of
animals including birds including humans it seems that markers of health and fitness and vigor are strongly correlated with sexual attraction and that's not arbitrary so we have these models with a lot of
multiple equilibria and then we have our common sense which says go to the gym to get a date in birds also how does that all fit together doesn't that mean it's not arbitrary uh well you know the interesting interesting thing is that that i think
you have there you have uh multiple ways to predict that that outcome one for example um is that well let's it i'm gonna take an aesthetic uh example right and for example if you say you went to uh the symphony and there was a violent
concerto or if you prefer uh a blues concert or even a rap rap concert right and in the middle of the cadenza or the solo or the the the biggest thing the the performer begins to break out into sweat right they're really exerting themselves
and the question is this do we like the music because they're sweating or do they have to sweat in order to make the musical performance that the audience likes and both of those are equal but the the uh most people would say that this is an indicator of quality because they're pushed to motor limits but aesthetic processes are gonna do the same right we don't like the ballet because um many uh amazing artisan athletes are
injured in the process of producing the ballet we like it because of the aesthetic impact of the ballet and and so um there are other hypotheses for why uh traits are extreme and maybe at the limits of performance limits or
health limits of of of those those individuals so um how do we differentiate between those two well spent a lot of time thinking about that and um uh i think that the special hypothesis the one that demands specific evidence is that the
correlation is actually a result of the uh relation between the signal and some other kind of benefit other than the uh the the the benefit of beauty but now i i have cardinals and blue jays in my backyard i enjoy them greatly i like their colors if bird aesthetics are arbitrary to the mating processes of birds why do i also find it beautiful isn't that a funny coincidence that that is deeply cool i think i i think that's because
uh you know humans are intelligent and we have um uh time on our hands and and and and and uh uh excess cognition and curiosity to burn and that leads us to to to to become fascinated by nature um but you know inner specific
uh aesthetic regard is is a fascinating thing i mean in the case of color and the case of song um it's explicable in some ways because at least some of this is physics right we there is an inherent wavelength relationship between various color
combinations um the same for um acoustics right which we can imagine the the harmonic relationship between notes in a bird song just like we could analyze a piece of music but the real fundamental mystery is why do flowers smell beautiful and and that one does not have at least immediately uh uh uh you know appealing answers uh because uh yeah it turns out there are no receptor genes in common between a bee and a human and they're responding to
the same flower uh odors in a similar way i don't think it's it's because the olfactory space is just you know filled with all sorts of other things and that's where they're left and and we learn about that i i think they are generally positive so i think that's uh there are uh graduate level um uh research questions to be pursued in inner species of interspecific aesthetic uh uh the impression building on that example what can avian evolutionary
theory learn from how flowers attract pollinators through signals it seems they use color they use nectar they use deceptive mimicry but it can't be the same kind of fishery and co-evolution yet the final result is beautiful so
doesn't that imply it's not fishery and co-evolution that is generating the beauty well certainly uh in in in the one thing about uh pollen uh pollinator and and and plant interactions that they're different species right for the
from the from the pollinator perspective the pollinator is getting food um nectar and sometimes uh uh eating the pollen but from the plant perspective the plant is getting uh animal aid in dispersing their gametes to reproduce with other plants right so what is the what is the plant doing the plant is investing in in in in another animal in order to do that it has to advertise its opportunity right so this is really in the realm of advertising
and so what the flower really has to be is memorably rewarding right and so to me that's like going into the grocery store and you look at a coke can or a box of cereal and there's literally nothing on the can or on the box that will tell you
anything about what the experience of eating or interacting with that product will be like and that's exactly what flowers are like right and so there's a whole realm of this field in biology trying to emphasize
co-evolution that particular flowers and particular uh pollinators interact and of course those do occur but the vast majority you know of flowers are are pollinated by generalists and the last vast majority of pollinators are
generalist pollinators right so they have to be memorably rewarding so some of them are like doritos you know you reach over and you grab one but it's not really what you need and then some products you'll go further for because they're
really really rewarding uh but um and this implies actually that bees are making choices and if bees were not making choices then the world wouldn't be full of beautiful flowers right all the flowers would be exploiting that
one button that was the most efficient way to get that bee just to show up and feed but of course all the flowers would come to look like each other and then they wouldn't be carrying their pollen to another one of their same species
so the whole thing would fail right so bees are making choices and they're making aesthetic choices based on the memorably rewarding experience of visiting a flower of course for a bee a flower is like architecture plus ol faction uh plus you know and actually electroelectric turns out um hummingbirds and and and and insects establish a static charge as they fly and so as they approach the flower it's like you know when you have rub a
balloon on your hair and you feel you can feel the balloon getting near your hair your hair starts to stand up or whatever they as they approach the flower they can actually experience this electrocharge the hairs on their bodies
stand up and so they can tell and of course when the bee forages at the flower the uh the charge is neutralized right so they can they can tell whether the flower how recently that flower has been visited before they even get there by the uh the
static uh force acting on their hairs this is a subjective experience that that really influences their choices in the world so um what does that have to do with bird breeding your question well it has to do with the fact that we put the subjective experience of the animal at the center of our analysis and and uh and indeed uh that leads i think to you know really accurate uh understanding of what's going on in nature now you mentioned fisher we
didn't talk about that but what is a fisheries process a fisheries process is a self-organizing uh uh um you know sexual selection uh mechanism where genes for preference liking long or short tails become correlated with genes for the trait having a short tail or having a long tail right individuals who like long tails are going to find mates with them and even like short tails i got to find mates with those so those two forms of variation will
start to co-vary and that means when you select when an individual selects on a mate they're also indirectly selecting on co-varying or correlated genetic variation for preference so that means the whole thing can just run itself
and of course it does and produces a lot of a lot of diversity before we move on let me put in a plug for your excellent and award-winning book the evolution of beauty now let's go to birding let's say you're a birder with a
collecting mentality should it count if you only hear the bird like a nightingale and a thicket well you know it definitely counts the question is what does it count for right and and i am one of those birders uh you know and and moving from animal subjectivity to birder subjectivity right uh bird watching is i mean what the list really is about is is accounting for your subjective experience of the bird right it doesn't just matter
that there's that bird in that tree what matters did you see it or did you hear it uh right and and uh that's your your experience of it and um uh hearing a bird for some birds is more spectacular than seeing them obviously
uh but yes but people do uh make different sorts of lists and uh typically for what's called one's life list people really want to see the bird uh you know have i ever seen the bird and then but if it's for a a more minor list your
day list your state list or um uh actually data points then hearing it is just as good as seeing it if it's for the for the for the purposes of data right now ammuters have so much ready access to technology iphones airpods so much more how is this shaping the evolution of bird watching oh my gosh it revolutionized it uh there are uh two programs produced by the uh the lab of ornithology at cornell university that have really transformed
birding one is called ebird uh right where you can keep live checklists you can on your phone as you go uh that's um and then the other is merlin which will actually identify photographs using artificial intelligence
of birds so they take a photograph of a bird and load it up and it'll tell you what it is with for most parts of the world with you know incredible accuracy for comet birds and uh and really quite a a elaborate ability for for even obscure
birds um what you have to say now is in addition to an electronic camera young folks today are burning with their phones their data are going up to the cloud in real time and influencing what other bird watchers are doing and uh and becoming the subject of science through sort of citizen science so it's really been a huge revolution so birding in the sense is a bit like chess a quite unlikely winner from the rise of the internet and
technology but exploding in popularity i i don't know i mean i guess my fingers aren't quite enough on the pulse uh uh i you know we went through a long time because as a kid i i grew up uh birding i started at the age of 10. and for me it was all
about going outside it's like you know i'm going out after school screen door slams and there you go you're off outside and uh and i you know have been concerned for a long time about whether the way children are raised in
the you know modern world that not enough of that is happening uh if people get back outside through their phones i think that's great uh but uh but it does it it is it is uh it is uh it's still i'm i'm old school you know i i i uh uh i'm not keeping my checklist uh during the day right as we go of course that means my data are probably as high quality either so uh but uh uh um but i think some people are what's the most important bird
missing from your personal checklist and hearing it doesn't count you've already told us you know well it there's lots of different measures but you know sometimes it's all it's all there's there's no rationality to it right
for uh for uh i once took a trip up to uh well about five six years ago i took a trip up to northern norway to see um stellar's eider a duck that uh that if you imagine you know between norway and alaska like what is there way
way up there you know that's where they nest and in this in the winter they only barely come down to norway or alaska and uh so i wanted to see them and i got up there and a date of you know 10 years ago i would have seen on that
date i would have seen a thousand five years before i would have seen a hundred and by the time i got there climate change was happening so rapidly in the arctic that i got there and there were none to be seen on that date
right and so i've been really desperate to see stellar zeiter just cuz right because you take a notion uh and uh that's the beautiful thing i would love what i really love would be like what's uh you know because the history of life is a tree i've been very interested in the phylogeny birds you know who's related to whom the big tree of life and the tree of birds and you can see well i've seen these and these species but i
haven't seen these what's the species most unrelated to any species i've seen that i could no what would be the species that would give me the most the best addition to my total sample of avian diversity amoa that's a well i mean well exactly well you know the the answer right off the bat for most people would probably the watson and the watson is a very weird vegetarian or leaf-eating amazonian bird and the bird probably most unrelated to any
other living bird after that it gets a lot of specific things to you know what you've seen but uh um yeah the the next trip you're planning those are the most important birds to see it seems there's been a lot of
big advances on the research side lately so there's cheap tagging much easier radio telemetry applying machine learning to birdsong what's the most important thing going to come out of all these very new advances well you've only just begun to skim the
skin the surface i mean um i used to think and i'll i'll say this proudly just to embarrass myself i used to i used to think that the chicken genome was the most uninteresting thing i could ever imagine right and it turns out you know genomics has really been fantastically revealing four features we ultimately want to know about like uh uh you know the funny features that characterize birds so uh transcriptomes uh taking a tissue and sequencing
all of the rna that's being expressed at the moment getting an idea of what uh expression states are in different kinds of cells on up on on on your tagging technology that's been fantastic the max planck institute for animal movement in germany has put up icarus a big satellite that is uh capturing uh in real time data on animal movement at individual animals so they're getting basically the whole entire movement of uh of a life of a wild animal
and you get enough of those and sure enough you you get a very new view of what's going on uh in the world you know the interesting thing about progress is you never know what is going to turn up right i mean uh and that's where the the opportunities are but you know figure out what's the best way to to use that technology to answer uh or or address a cool issue in in birds what's your favorite word for a group of birds is it a covey
of quails an unkindness of ravens a parliament of owls which one oh i don't know i think my favorite my favorite uh word for a group of birds would be the genus [Laughter] a different group a historical group should we use bird feeders in our
backyards i think so i i love my bird feeders and um and i really enjoy them um and i think that there are some downsides uh um you know in particular being sites of potential infection for uh diseases that are that are moving
through um uh they're the opposite of of of of social distancing right they're social concentrating so they can they can't be uh centers for uh conjunctivitis-like illnesses in in finches recently in the united states etc
do they just worsen the malthusian equilibrium and how well does the malthusian subsistence theory predict bird populations like our birds at the margin of subsistence as a whole you know you know one of the things one of the things that malphus
didn't take into account was like uh you know uh um or much account into was uh you know variability right the fact that uh uh you know an ice storm for example birds a lot of birds in the winter if we think about birds at your feeder
um they can do fine at 10 minus 5 minus 10 degrees fahrenheit minus 20 you know if you get the chickadees right if they have enough food but if they don't have access to food they will die in a single night right and
and so these ice storms which could be you know just 32 degrees covering all the food the whole environment with ice for a day can be just devastating for a lot of lots of birds if there weren't feeders they would they would they their pipelines would really harm things like carolina wren which is a bird kind of expanding and i i think a big ice storm will set down carolina red populations at the edge of the range in new england
or the mid-atlantic for you know five years it'll take them to to rebound after that do we have good theories of bird property rights somehow invoking the ideas of relative scarcities to explain when birds are territorial or
not territorial or is that just a big mess that we don't understand no there there are some there are some there's some i think uh good things so if you're uh um if you're say an aerial insectivore you're you know catching insects in the air
you'll be territorial if you catch insects like you know that are 15 inches away from a branch right just you know going out for a little sally you can defend all those branches that's my territory but if you're a swift or a swallow and you're you're flying hundreds of meters or hundreds of feet up in the air and all of it you know it's very hard to defend that right uh so so you give it up right um [Music] you know lots of marsh birds uh marshes
are very rich lots of bugs so if you can grab your patch of lily pads or or or or bull rushes or cattails you can really do well you want to defend that but you know if you're a puddle duck there's going to be lots of water in there the things you know somewhere you know 18 inches below the surface of the water uh you can't really defend that and so so uh for the most part you know so sort of very with your body your ecology etc um you know
and we can do experiments so for example sometimes hummingbirds will defend a floral resource and then when it gets big enough they'll just give it up because there's no reason to do it anymore now in all of these conversations we have a segment in the middle called underrated versus overrated i toss out a name and id a place you tell me if you think it's underrated or overrated got it okay i i i'm not sure we have this we will
we'll it could be a combination of rorschach test too because what do we think of the thing that's named but yeah go for it we'll go for it roger mcguinn uh i don't know who that is i thought you were an expert about the
birds here's an easier one larry bird larry bird larry bird is is uh perfectly rated he uh the bird song music of messian the french composer oh well you know i think uh way underrated i i love that stuff charlie parker uh and what's your
favorite cut by him well i i i know it when i hear it but i don't you know i actually have albums where i know which cut is which but i don't know i actually haven't looked at the liner notes and not enough to know it has to be
ornithology right yeah yes well yeah yeah but uh um yeah the alfred underrated the alfred hitchcock movie the birds overrated why you know i mean uh i think it does a lot of damage to be afraid of nature right and uh you know and and i think
um i know people that are bird phobic and i'm not sure whether you know whether it rises from that from something like that movie so yeah is the diversity of the protagonists and the birds a kind of portent does that make it more terrifying or just just just the the sinister turn that all of nature is out to get us you know uh i i i mean i i think i i when i saw it you know in maybe it is black and white i saw it in tv and black and white as a
kid i just crossed my arms and i don't know i've never seen it since john james audubon as an artist overrated or underrated i think i think we're still underrating what he achieved who was your favorite bird artist is it him
uh uh an artist no george mish sutton george sutton who was a an american water colorist of american birds fantastic fantastic uh renditions of birds he really he really uh was amazing at both the art and the ornithology putting
aside birds travel in suriname should i go well i haven't been in more than a decade so but you should definitely go it's a marvelous part of the world i think it's on hard times uh in in in recent decades beautiful beautiful people and uh and marvelous avafana let's say a good friend comes to you who has reasonable income well-educated but not an ornithologist not even a birder but interested and this person says i have a month
of my life and i want to go around the world i can go anywhere feasible and look at birds what is the perfect tour for that person you're in charge where do you send them that's fascinating you know i think one of the things that can impress uh uh a person without without the experience to understand that the hard work is is worthwhile or will be worthwhile is is spectacle right and and so things like uh you know penguin colonies
in in the antarctic are just you know profoundly uh amazing and uh so so so so that would definitely be a possibility um other kinds of ornithological speckles depends how how young they were some people you know they say they're
40. so they're they're able-bodied yeah they're not a rock climber do you send them to colombia to panama oh yeah but the problem the problem with some of those places is of course is that the bird watching is hard it really is hard work
right and i know i've taken students who know little well they've they've had half of my ornithology course taken them to ecuador and and you know we've seen 100 you know 490 species of birds in in 10 days and uh usually their brand their brains
are fried right and we just you know we you know it's it's a lot it's a lot of work and uh uh so so so but i think you need to be over a little hump before you before you do that uh so uh spectacle would be good so um
another thing one thing i did that was last uh of in in 2018 in brazil um i went to see um a a nesting site a nesting colony of spix's macaw this is a a very uh um oh sorry lyrism cause fixes macau is the one that's in there lear's macaw it's a it's a uh it's a uh sort of aqua gree aqua bluish green turquoise uh uh parrot and it nests in a cliff face with uh uh where there are holes and uh they come out of this cliff face in the dawn
it's kind of a a huge cliff with a kind of cavern in front of you and they fly around and it's just it was unbelievably moving it's unbelievably uh uh beautiful and these are intelligent birds that live for decades know each other as individuals and
unfortunately critically endangered but being well conserved at this site so there are a number of things like that you know an oil bird cave is another incredible thing for the right person these are nocturnal frugivores they live
in caves in south america and andes and they fly out of the cave at night and fly dozens or even hundreds of miles out to forage on avocado and palm fruits that they bring back to the cave and feed to their babies and they're called oil birds because they used to capture them and render them down for oil and cook with it and you know make candles out of it uh that's how fatty they are you know from the avocado oil but going to an oil beer
cave is amazing and often you have a deep in the cave you'll see a a forest of ideolated seedlings all white they no photosensitis they've they've uh uh started to propagate in the guano and the guano will have looked like guacamole green because that's what they're actually eating avocados that way it's a you know sort of the edges of ornithological experience so for the right person that some things like that could really be uh really be the
the best why is it that birds such as falcons and cormorants hunt and fish with us how did that happen you know domestication is a cool thing it's like well people intercede with nature and uh and somehow co-opt the but somehow
i want another somehow is it that they're smart enough to figure out gains from trade has it become instinct um i think it's that uh mostly that well you get them you get the animal while it's young so in traditionally falconry
you would get the bird on southern migration and capture it uh you could tell it was naive it could you could fool it easier so it's easier to capture and then you'd you know you either hold it for a year or over the winter or and then let it go and then later you you kept with it you know they haven't become a domesticated strain if you will like a chicken or a dog um but you're you're you're co-opting the capacity it's like having a pet parrot
right the parrot thinks it's a human and uh the way it develops in this new environment with human social partners is is extraordinary and different and uh so that's how that's how that uh how how that works um the fishing in the cormorants i i don't know if it's still going on it was a tradition in in in areas of japan i know but i i i've never uh witnessed it or or seen it happen i think that those birds are captured from the
wild they don't breed them i don't believe here's a question from a reader and i quote osprey they hatch early july or flying by the last week of august the adults leave around september 15th heading south and the young ones hang around for a couple of weeks bulking up on the late landlocked salmon spawns then head south end quote how exactly do they know where to go how exactly does this bird instinct work this is great we we
we and this is actually an area uh where we're learning a lot because of new technology so now we have these uh uh uh gps transmitters that you can get uh uh satellite information in real time on where those birds are and this is the work i
mostly i believe of rob beer regard who has done this in ospreys so and most ospreys spend the winter in a very narrow area area of the janos of venezuela and colombia that's where ospreys go or at least in this continent and so
um what the young ospreys do is they fly off the east coast kind of wandering around in the ocean sometimes they hit bermuda sometimes they you know want to they might return to north south carolina and then they they basically mess it up
but somehow rather eventually they get down to the antilles and they realize oh and they follow the chain of the lesser antilles down to south america and then on the way north they realize oh we've got the guajira peninsula
you know in in in in in northern colombia and then we pass over oh we get to jamaica and then we and then they go boom and they return up through florida to these and then what do they do next year they go down to florida jump over to cube we'll come down the islands so it's a combination so what do birds need to migrate they need to have a magnetic compass they also have a sun compass they have to have a clock and an experience of the sun uh
and they have to know kind of they need a map about which we don't know much um and then they have to have a bearing like where they're going and then a sense of how far to go or from a map whether they've reached their destination and
then once they in in in real life uh they experience the world and then refine that with experience so they have some innate uh properties or capacities and then a lot of experience though and of course a lot of them uh uh
you know failed to learn and uh you know i'm sure some of those birds that wander out in the ocean you know fail uh how much is there a generalized g factor for the intelligence of birds so for instance if they're good at using one factor pardon for humans we would call it a g factor so if you're smart at one thing you tend to be smart at another how much if a bird is so good at using tools or good at playing is the bird just smart flat out
or are birds highly specialized in their smartness they're really smart at one thing and then very stupid at another yeah that's that's a great question i think i think that um uh there are lots of examples of extraordinarily specific smartness in birds that doesn't apply but the birds that are really smart tend to be smart at a lot of stuff so there's a few of them that stand out with breadth of smarts and i'm thinking parrots and
crows uh corvids and parrots they're they're the most noble they stand out above of above everybody else and indeed you know now if you look at the the palial neurons which are basically the ones with the smart connections
a parrot will have more pallial neurons than than a monkey with a brain that's four or five times as large right so they really are uh they've gone a different route in their organization of cognitive complexity and they're really doing it
really efficiently um but there are all sorts of extraordinary intelligences that are that are very very specific in in birds i think and uh and um that that don't have that property do you think ravens and crows understand death oh wow i don't know i have i you know a lot of birds go crazy when they see other dead birds right they make a lot of noise doesn't mean they understand death but they know something's gone wrong no no uh no uh but i
i do think there are examples of birds carl saffina has has catalogued these and i don't i don't know that literature but there are certainly examples of birds uh that appear to be mourning or understanding that they're that their compatriots are are are are physically present but not no longer living right whatever that is um uh i wouldn't be surprised if they do right i mean they know each other's individuals uh deeply and uh appreciate it and
you know we were mentioning albatross earlier one of the things about albatross the big ones they nest every other year so in every albatross colony there's an even year cohort and an odd year cohort that returns and they they take off the other year then come back to reproduce and and they're monogamous over decades if they live long enough right and so they'll spend that year off nine and a half months or 12 15 months whatever it is and they'll
even fly around the entire south south southern continents around antarctica a couple times then return uh to the farallon or malvenis islands and then meet that same mate and then made again right and they
recognize each other and so those kinds of uh of they i certainly think they would understand that that bird is not not returning and birds have culture right absolutely about half the birds of the world just for one example of culture half the
birds of the world learn their songs from other members of their species almost always not their parents and what that means is you've got a decoupling from genetic variation and the phenotype or the the presentation of the animal
so what do they do they they learn from other individuals and uh they learn preferences so the birds in the areas around chicago new york and boston sound differently just like the people do and for pretty much the exact same
reason right and it's not because of the the the the wind in chicago or the baked beans in boston right it's it's it's uh it's isolation by distance and historical contingency and cultural change so birds have been doing culture for tens of millions of years which you know puts us to shame certainly in in terms of diversity of course we piled a lot of culture on our one little invention and uh and that's notable and and uh and uh interesting in
its own right too will puffins perish wow you know the oceans are getting deeply screwed up and climate change both of these combinations are really affecting the arctic or northern comp i don't think the puffins will go extinct on the you know couple century scale but uh but um their distributions and lives are really going to change i think should we try to find the dna of passenger pigeons and bring them back you know um i find this rewilding
business to be uh or revivification to be really uh off-putting um however and mostly because i well mostly because mostly because i mean the reason why it went extinct is that it needed continental scale uh you know richness of oh no
chestnut and oak forest in order to survive and there's just no place in the world what that is right they they they're extraordinarily social uh they only laid one egg right a year which means that they were very they
were uh what we call uh you know case elected you know it was a they were and and so as a result um you know there's very almost no place uh for them in the world uh uh having said that most of my criticism are also um framed by the unrealism of the technology just like okay so we find a few genes and we put them into uh bantale pigeon the sister group the syst the closest extinct species and we put them in we kind of make it a little bit
more like a passenger pigeon wouldn't that be cool it's like well no that's not really cool but it i mean if we really had the technology really bring back patrick pigeons and sure i'd be into that but uh we we're very very far from that what's the best overall framework for thinking about the actual value of av and biodiversity when we face real trade-offs so are we going to put in more wind power right so it's going to kill some birds but it
might help with climate change how do we even begin to approach a question like that yeah yeah do we ask the economists you're not going to ask me right you know i had uh actually i had a uh i'm just grading term papers right
now in ornithology and i had a tert paper analogy exactly on this question that was pretty good you know by uh by a uh a a a political science student with interested in uh in environmental uh policy uh so um yeah i i i i'm not sure
i i don't know if i've got the training to to say that except to understand that yeah it is real trade-offs i think we're making them all all the time uh i think in general i mean if there were enlightened policy like you know carb
attacks etc even a little bit of it you know we'd be in much better situation to see see where you know you know maybe it would solve itself uh but you know there's certainly a lot of uh a lot of reason for concern there's also a
lot of interesting resilience right we're looking in new england here where i live you know we used to have uh chestnut trees and they disappeared and we used to have elm trees and they basically became irrelevant right and now we're looking at hemlocks disappearing because of the woolly adelgid and now you know uh ashes the emerald ash borer from china has arrived and you know so we're we're losing major trees and yet yet there's still seem to
have foreign you know some birds in them now they're less birds fewer birds that's true but um there seems to be not as much uh some kind of resilience uh despite this change but you know i don't know i wish i had a better answer but that's that's that that's um i'm still a historian rather than a uh a predictor in my work is one billion too many sparrows no is it wrong to own a cat that you let outside yes just flat out wrong yeah but if we
don't know how to make the trade-offs how do we know it's wrong well because i mean that is really really clear i mean you you have uh concocted created an artificial predator that you're that you're keeping uh
really happy and healthy and feeding it and uh you know keep it in a peak condition so that you can have it go outside and and uh and entertain itself and it's entertainment is damaging to the world i mean that you know the the scale of cat death
i don't know the numbers but that you know way more uh birds are killed by cats and are killed by all the wind power in america it's just it's it's devastating it's billions of birds i read an estimate recently did not seem to be scientifically serious but it suggested that a billion birds die each year just by crashing into human things is that plausible that the number is that high sure but but i'll tell you that the the data for cats is
way bigger than that so cats you know kill more birds than all the skyscrapers and uh and windmills and these are you know pets and also feral cats that are maintained by humans very last segment of our chat it's what i call the richard prom production function how did growing up in rural vermont help influence who you are professionally and lead to your success um you know a lot of my science is deeply rooted in natural history right
i am not interested in law-like properties of nature but in the uh idiosyncratic instances and um a lot of that that view grew out of bird watching grew out of my childhood and being interested in birds and a lot of people do birding
and then go into science right but but for me somehow that that birding experience uh affected how i do science and i think that um somehow they're you know i have kind of a minority style of mind in in in modern science a lot of a lot
of great scientists out there but most of them are not thinking the way i do and so as a result there just seemed to be more opportunities what's that difference in how you think how would you characterize it
and it's most fundamental i really care about birds i think that birds are really interesting so i am not necessarily worried about what the other guy i mean of course here's the deal science you know my favorite onion article was it was the title
you know nsf studies show science is hard right yeah science is hard so what are people's response to that the fact that science is hard a lot of people will go and say well if i'm going to expend a lot of energy i better do something that somebody else thinks is important so what do you think is important and they and they look to the sides and they think that that is doing something that somebody else thinks is important is their is their
mission right and i think about the birds and i think what is the coolest thing that i could do with my time now or this day this next day ahead of me that would solve some answer and and of course i love to connect that to big science whether it's like where did feathers come from or how do bluebirds get blue areas that i've you know worked on um and and and in many cases they turn out to have uh you know uh deep implications for their field
but um but it's that regard for the birds it's a kind of what uh what uh don haraway calls a situated knowledge right it that you it's not the voice from nowhere it's the the specific instance the the the view from here and and where that here is so and i think you know i i recently read a paper in in an esteemed journal called the american naturalist right which is very highly ranked but has this sort of uh you know sounds like a wildflower a
garden club report or something anyway the american naturals and it was uh uh you got 2 000 words into the into the paper before you realized that it's about house friends in ohio right now now you know what what is going on there i think people are embarrassed about the position of their work they're so interested in the general principles of like oh this is a big incisive issue that biologists need to solve and um and that generalized frame
is leading us often astray to do work that's uninspired or a lot incremental like everybody else is doing or et cetera so so um and maybe that you know you're you're you're you're pushing me in new ways uh so maybe it's being the only bird
watcher that i do under the age of of 25 as a child for a long time um led me to think you know you just got to rely on yourself to figure out what what what's what's a value in in your work who first spotted your talent for
studying birds other than you you know as a kid i interacted with a number of people that were mostly garden club ladies right they were my mom's age or older or retired people they had cars i did not have a car in
fourth grade fifth grade right so it was a great deal we went and uh and and they certainly did a great deal to cultivate me but uh so garden club ladies are underrated that's what you're telling us absolutely absolutely that's a that's a
big that's a big one uh and then natural history their introduction to flowers and ferns and to into and to another way of being outdoors which was actually i related too much better than the boy scouts right which which i i i left pretty quickly
uh but then uh i met a a a young yaylee then hippie uh hanging out inside a guy named tom will who's uh now uh just recently retired from the fish and wildlife service uh and and he was a great mentor uh early on in birding
last question other than the obvious such as intelligence hard work how do you recognize a very talented prospective ornithologist what is it you look for it's like you know you just get these responses and of course it has luckily i have had well i've had privilege teach lots of really amazing people but you're explaining something to somebody giving them a bit of a context and then all of a sudden you know you get a shot back
you get a response back and you're like oh yeah they got that that this is the next thing right they got that oh and then you get and it pitches back right that interplay where you you link something out and they see
where you're headed and ask you a question and they often will say wow this is a real i don't know if this is a dumb question but what about blind it's like that's not a dumb question that's the fundamental focus of where this whole field is going
and and you know uh uh and i've experienced you know i used to teach at the university of kansas and uh and in kansas this uh you know it was a big very huge university uh but the great the great students were
were were as good as anywhere and and uh you know and then you would have a marvelous experience of of discovering uh a student who was really smart and didn't actually know it uh they might have been the smartest kid in their town and you know
coming off somewhere in west kansas but they had never had an opportunity to experience uh what they were capable of right so uh it's really that response do they are they coming back at you with uh with uh
with their own thoughts richard prum thank you very much and again a big plug for richard's book the evolution of beauty how darwin's forgotten theory of mate choice shapes the animal world and us thank you richard thank you that was really fun