Okay, But... Birds

E39. Every August the questions start: there is a cardinal at the feeder with no head feathers, and it looks terrible. Nothing is wrong with it. It is molting, which every bird does at least every year. Dr. Ryan Terrill of the San Diego Natural History Museum studies what a feather endures over a year and what it takes to replace one, and he makes the case that the few weeks a bird spends looking its worst may be the most consequential weeks it has.
In this episode, you'll hear about:
Why the cardinal at your feeder in late summer looks like it lost a fight
What a bird quietly gives up during the weeks it is growing new feathers
The hundreds of miles some birds fly for the sake of a new set of feathers
All audio, video, and images in this episode are either original to Okay, But... Birds (© Okay Media, LLC) or used under license/permission from the respective rights holders. Media from the Macaulay Library is used courtesy of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology as follows:
Northern Cardinal audio contributed by Wil Hershberger, ML191165
American Goldfinch audio contributed by Wil Hershberger, ML94457
Blue Jay audio contributed by Gaetan Dupont, ML173749
Herring Gull audio contributed by Sarah MacLean, ML165927
American Herring Gull video contributed by Steve Kelling, ML540908261
Snow Bunting audio contributed by Gerrit Vyn, ML130973
Red-tailed hawk audio contributed by David McCartt, ML229578
White-throated Sparrow audio contributed by Bob McGuire, ML219799
Great Hornbill audio contributed by Linda Macaulay, ML111527
Flightless Cormorant audio contributed by Linda Macaulay, ML237486

E38. You have pulled one out of a jacket sleeve at a bad angle, picked one up on a walk, and you are almost certainly within arm's reach of a few thousand of them right now. Dr. Cody Limber, who recently finished his PhD at Yale, spent it taking growing feathers apart one cell at a time to find out what they are actually made of. A feather is not a fancy scale, it does not grow the way you would guess, and after all this time nobody can say what the first ones were for.
In this episode, you'll hear about:
The strangest things growing out of birds, and which of them actually count as feathers
What a feather is actually made of, once you smash one into individual cells and read what every cell was doing
What a feather actually is, whether it is alive or dead, how it is put together, and the coordination that color and pattern demand
All audio, video, and images in this episode are either original to Okay, But... Birds (© Okay Media, LLC) or used under license/permission from the respective rights holders. Media from the Macaulay Library is used courtesy of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology as follows:
Eastern Whip-poor-will audio contributed by Bob McGuire, ML195774
Red-bellied Woodpecker audio contributed by Wil Hershberger, ML306064
Indian Peafowl audio contributed by Rounak choudhary, ML621021542
Common Raven audio contributed by Gerrit Vyn, ML132161
Mallard audio contributed by Mike Andersen, ML136504
Double-crested Cormorant audio contributed by Bob McGuire, ML233274
Zebra Finch (Australian) audio contributed by Vicki Powys, ML226233
American Herring Gull video contributed by Steve Kelling, ML540908261
Golden-winged Warbler video contributed by Benjamin Clock, ML476422
Great Argus audio contributed by Arnoud B. van den Berg, ML71122
Horned Screamer audio contributed by Paul A. Schwartz, ML58925
Wild Turkey audio contributed by James (Jim) Holmes, ML73964601

E37. A bird called Wisdom was banded on Midway Atoll in 1956 and is still laying eggs today, which makes her at least 75 and the oldest known wild bird on the planet. She has also outlived the man who banded her, and most of the scientists who tracked her since. Dr. Etienne Rouby studies long-lived seabirds at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at CU Boulder, working with data from the French sub-Antarctic islands where wandering albatross have been followed for more than half a century. Scott asks him what you can learn from a bird that will outlast your career, your funding, and possibly your field station.
In this episode you'll hear about:
What a fledgling albatross does for the first five years of its life, and why nobody really knows
The fishing gear change that pulled a colony back from the brink, and how long it took to see it working
Why a very good year for female albatross is a very bad year for the males
All audio, video, and images in this episode are either original to Okay, But... Birds (© Okay Media, LLC) or used under license/permission from the respective rights holders. Media from the Macaulay Library is used courtesy of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology as follows:
Snowy Albatross audio contributed by Ted Parker, ML42306
Black-browed Albatross audio contributed by Jan Hansen, ML650026815

E36. Hummingbirds run one of the fastest metabolisms of any animal with a backbone, which is why we picture them as permanently buzzing. Scott sits down with Dr. Anusha Shankar, assistant professor at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, who studies how hummingbirds budget energy in a world that keeps moving the goalposts. It turns out the blur at your feeder is the exception, not the rule.
In this episode you'll hear about:
Why the same bird might spend three hours a day flying, or thirteen, depending entirely on what the flowers are doing
What happens overnight when a hummingbird lets itself go cold, and how long it takes to come back
Seven months in the Ecuadorian cloud forest, and the hummingbirds that sat on the nets and waited
Plus: the doubly labeled water method, a sugar concentration threshold you can taste-test at your own feeder at your own risk, and the reason Anusha gets called the hummingbird pee person.
The "snoring" hummingbird video Scott and Anusha discuss: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uEfmQt34Nc
All audio, video, and images in this episode are either original to Okay, But... Birds (© Okay Media, LLC) or used under license/permission from the respective rights holders. Media from the Macaulay Library is used courtesy of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology as follows:
Ruby-throated Hummingbird audio contributed by Trenton Voytko, ML604314061
Black Metaltail audio contributed by Pedro Allasi Condo, ML663268821
Violet-tailed Sylph audio contributed by Paul Coopmans, ML58045
White-booted Racket-tail audio contributed by Daniel Cadena, ML256331
Bee Hummingbird video contributed by Timothy Barksdale, ML440270
Black Metaltail photograph by Thibaud Aronson, via iNaturalist and Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

E35. Eighteen species of small brown bird on a pile of volcanic rock have taught us more about how evolution actually works than almost anything else on Earth. Not because Darwin figured them out. He didn't. Because a handful of scientists went back, banded every bird on one island, and watched it happen in real time. Scott heads to the Galapagos with Dr. Erik Enbody, Assistant Professor of Computational Biology at Cornell University, to find out how one ancestor became eighteen, why the beak is the only thing worth looking at, and what happens when species that aren't supposed to interbreed start swapping genes anyway.
In this episode you'll hear about:
The island so small you can band every bird on it, and the drought that killed almost all of them
One gene that explains 40% of beak size, when nothing in human height explains even 1%
The finch that does something mind-blowingly villainous and what it says about how far evolution will go
All audio, video, and images in this episode are either original to Okay, But... Birds (© Okay Media, LLC) or used under license/permission from the respective rights holders. Media from the Macaulay Library is used courtesy of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology as follows:
Large Ground-Finch audio contributed by Robert I. Bowman, ML85965
Common Cactus-Finch audio contributed by Robert I. Bowman, ML86715
Small Tree-Finch audio contributed by Robert I. Bowman, ML85464
Vegetarian Finch audio contributed by Robert I. Bowman, ML82506
Galapagos Mockingbird audio contributed by Robert I. Bowman, ML45963
Española Mockingbird audio contributed by Herb Elliott, ML638777433
Floreana Mockingbird audio contributed by Robert I. Bowman, ML85455
San Cristobal Mockingbird audio contributed by Arnoud B. van den Berg, ML28656
Palm Tanager audio contributed by Curtis Marantz, ML88937
Blue-footed Booby audio contributed by Robert I. Bowman, ML85906
Vampire Ground-Finch audio contributed by Robert I. Bowman, ML86756
Woodpecker Finch audio contributed by Robert I. Bowman, ML82522
Paradise Tanager audio contributed by Curtis Marantz, ML127399
Galápagos Sea Lion audio contributed by Arnoud B. van den Berg, ML125020