Latest / Okay, But... Birds / Okay, but... pigeons!

Transcript

Okay, but... pigeons! · Okay, But... Birds

• 0:00
  Sometimes we'd be going to approach a flock of pigeons and they'd all scatter.
• 0:05
  Like, we don't think we did that.
• 0:07
  We don't think that was us.
• 0:08
  He's like, ah, we were hawk blocked.
• 0:10
  Yeah.
• 0:36
  Two world wars, 32 medals for valor, a 99% cancer detection rate, a starring role in Charles Darwin's most important book.
• 0:44
  And if you live in a city, you probably stepped around one this morning and called it a pest.
• 0:48
  We do this with a lot of common things.
• 0:50
  In North America, a blue jay is a flash of cobalt and a loud opinion in the trees.
• 0:54
  And for most experienced people,
• 0:55
  birders, it barely earns a second glance.
• 0:57
  Hand a pair of binoculars to a visitor from the UK or Japan and watch what happens when a blue jay lands six feet away.
• 1:03
  Now take that we stop noticing it instinct, give the animal a cosmopolitan range, an outsized ability to thrive next to humans and a tendency to occasionally poop on a windshield or your head.
• 1:13
  And you stop noticing it a different way.
• 1:15
  You start being annoyed by it.
• 1:17
  You stop calling it by its real name.
• 1:19
  You start using the slur, rats with wings.
• 1:22
  You write it off.
• 1:23
  Enter the pigeon, aka the rock dove, aka the rock pigeon.
• 1:27
  AKA, depending on your last sidewalk encounter, ugh.
• 1:30
  The pigeon is one of the most successful and quietly remarkable birds on the planet.
• 1:34
  They were one of the very first birds humans ever domesticated between 5 and 10,000 years ago.
• 1:39
  They navigate by the sun and Earth's magnetic field.
• 1:42
  They carried military communications across two world wars with a 95% delivery success rate.
• 1:47
  Charles Darwin kept them as pets and used them as the central case study and on the origin of species, as a textbook example of the power of artificial selection to generate many forms from one.
• 1:57
  They have learned to distinguish between paintings by Monet and Picasso, and in one study at UC Davis, learned to spot cancer in pathology slides at roughly 99% accuracy as a flock.
• 2:07
  Every rat with wings you've stepped around in a subway station is descended from a bird that has been quietly outperforming our expectations for centuries.
• 2:15
  Which brings us to the topic of today's episode.
• 2:17
  Okay, but pigeons.
• 2:19
  To help us unpack just how awesome pigeons are, I'm joined by Dr. Elizabeth Carlin, an evolutionary ecologist and postdoctoral fellow at the Living Earth Collaborative at Washington University in St. Louis.
• 2:29
  Hi.
• 2:30
  She did her PhD on the feral pigeons of the northeastern megacity from Boston down through DC, which led to her research being featured on Saturday Night Live and got her dubbed the Pigeon Stalker by the New York Times.
• 2:40
  After the break, Liz walks us through what the global takeover of urban spaces by pigeons actually says about urbanization as a force of nature.
• 2:47
  We get into our own research, which found that something as simple as how close a human can get to a pigeon before it flies turns out to be a window into evolution happening in real time.
• 2:56
  Stay tuned.
• 3:03
  Well, welcome back to the podcast, everyone.
• 3:05
  I'm really excited to be joined by Liz to talk all about pigeons.
• 3:08
  Thank you so much for having me, Scott.
• 3:09
  Of course.
• 3:10
  I thought we'd start off with just the fact that most people write pigeons off.
• 3:13
  You know, they're these birds we see day to day, especially if we live in cities.
• 3:18
  People write them off as a nuisance.
• 3:19
  Some people call them, unfortunately, rats with wings.
• 3:23
  But like, tell us all the reasons why they're getting it wrong.
• 3:27
  They're getting it wrong for so many reasons.
• 3:29
  First of all, instead of thinking about pigeons as a pest, let's think about them as this organism that has been kind of forced to live in this environment that it's not, it wasn't designed to live in.
• 3:44
  It didn't evolve to live in these cities.
• 3:46
  And here it is doing...
• 3:49
  a phenomenal job living alongside us and really taking advantage of that urban habitat.
• 3:56
  So they're scrappy little guys, you know, they're underdogs in a way.
• 4:02
  I, you know, I did my PhD in New York and oftentimes pigeons were the only wildlife that I was seeing on a daily basis.
• 4:10
  And it was kind of that reminder that I could be connected to nature, even in a city.
• 4:15
  I think when we're surrounded by concrete and pavement and buildings, we kind of forget that we as humans are still a part of nature.
• 4:26
  And these pigeons were this beautiful reminder to me that we are a part of nature, right?
• 4:33
  Here they are living alongside us.
• 4:35
  And hey, they're actually supporting the peregrine falcon population.
• 4:39
  They're supporting the red-tailed hawk population.
• 4:41
  And so I really liked that aspect of pigeons more than I ever thought I would.
• 4:47
  Definitely, yeah.
• 4:48
  I think that piece that we do live with nature, we're part of nature, and pigeons can remind us of that regardless of where we are is really beautiful.
• 4:55
  And they're with us in all these places for a lot of really interesting reasons, right?
• 5:00
  Like they didn't just...
• 5:01
  if we think about their native range, which is, and correct me if I'm wrong, but like, I think of the Strait of Gibraltar as part of the native range of the, you know, the rock dove.
• 5:11
  Yeah.
• 5:12
  North Africa, the Mideast and Southern Europe are kind of where they evolved.
• 5:20
  And then like, what are some of the reasons we brought them with us?
• 5:24
  Because they didn't just fly to North America or South America or other parts of Europe, right?
• 5:29
  Right.
• 5:29
  So they're on six of the seven continents now because European colonizers brought them with them.
• 5:36
  In part because they were really tasty.
• 5:38
  Yeah.
• 5:39
  They're really good.
• 5:41
  And if you ever get the chance to eat squab, I highly recommend it.
• 5:44
  I recommend it.
• 5:46
  It tastes a lot like beef.
• 5:48
  It's this really rich, dark meat.
• 5:51
  And that is one reason we brought them with us.
• 5:56
  They're this lovely tasting animal.
• 5:59
  On top of that, their guano, their poop produces fertilizer.
• 6:04
  And we can, you know, have pigeons in these dove coats and then they poop everywhere and we scoop that poop out and we toss it on our agricultural lands.
• 6:14
  And so they're not only providing meat, but they're helping fertilize our crops.
• 6:19
  And that's like a win-win.
• 6:22
  And so we started bringing them everywhere because they provided this for us.
• 6:27
  Squab is still on the menu, but typically now only at high-end restaurants.
• 6:32
  A lot of people order squab.
• 6:33
  I don't think they maybe even realize that they're eating a pigeon or a rock dove.
• 6:38
  From a just urbanization and force of nature perspective, what can we learn from pigeons?
• 6:43
  So I think for a long time, we thought that evolution took a really long time to take place.
• 6:49
  That was when I was kind of going to school.
• 6:51
  We're like, oh, it's on the order of millennia.
• 6:53
  And here we are finding out that, you know, urban spaces can provide this very rapid selection for organisms.
• 7:03
  And so for me, at least, pigeons are this great case study of urban evolution where cities are shaping this wildlife population.
• 7:12
  Yeah.
• 7:13
  And so I'm really excited about pigeons as this potential model to study cities all around the world.
• 7:20
  And I was quite surprised when I entered my PhD and people were not working on these wild pigeons.
• 7:26
  There were very, very few groups that...
• 7:30
  thinking about pigeons.
• 7:31
  And maybe that's because they're considered a trash bird.
• 7:35
  But there's a lot to be studied there in terms of how are they doing in urban spaces?
• 7:42
  How are they, you know, how are they not developing diabetes when they're eating donuts?
• 7:48
  There was one of my favorite places in New York City to catch pigeons was a place where someone would come and dump out bags of donuts for the pigeons.
• 7:59
  Yeah.
• 8:00
  Ugh.
• 8:02
  And, you know, 300 pigeons would flock down into this little square and eat up those donuts very quickly, fly away.
• 8:12
  And then maybe 45 minutes later, another person would come out and dump a bag of rice.
• 8:18
  And so how these pigeons were able to kind of eat this human anthropogenic food and be able to not get super sick from it, not develop diabetes, these high blood sugar levels, not develop all these endocrine problems and digestive problems, I think is really interesting.
• 8:40
  Yeah.
• 8:40
  Yeah.
• 8:41
  And so in that context of this altered diet, there's other species in urban spaces that people are starting to study and think about the same questions, right?
• 8:48
  Like these urban diets typically are more complex carbohydrate rich than a natural diet.
• 8:54
  And that does have implications for, I think, raccoons and coyotes and possibly other species have been studied in the same context, like over evolutionary time, how are they changing in order to actually be able to process these foods, which is really cool.
• 9:07
  Some of your research looked at how close a human can get to a pigeon before it flies away.
• 9:12
  One, why is it interesting?
• 9:13
  Like, why were you excited to look at that specifically?
• 9:17
  And then what's driving the variation that you found?
• 9:20
  Yeah.
• 9:21
  So I thought this experiment was so funny because I can guarantee everybody listening right now has done this experiment at some point in their life.
• 9:30
  True participatory science, right?
• 9:32
  Right, right.
• 9:34
  That everybody has looked at how close they could get, if they could catch the pigeon, if they could touch the pigeon, um...
• 9:42
  all of those things.
• 9:44
  And I really liked that idea.
• 9:47
  And then additionally, like when I got to New York, people, and I said I was studying pigeons, people kept saying, well, you know, why can I get so close to pigeons in Times Square?
• 9:57
  Like I could practically...
• 9:59
  kick a pigeon in Times Square, they won't get out of the way.
• 10:02
  And I thought that was really interesting because Times Square is just, it's flooded with people.
• 10:09
  But Prospect Park looks very different than Times Square.
• 10:14
  And Greenwood Cemetery looks very different.
• 10:17
  So New York has suburbs and industrial areas and heavily urbanized areas.
• 10:25
  And so I was just really interested in this question.
• 10:29
  We use flight initiation distance really frequently as an animal behavior study, which is just, again, how close can I approach this organism before it starts to flee?
• 10:40
  And it doesn't have to fly away.
• 10:42
  It could run away or jump or, you know, however it escapes.
• 10:48
  And it seemed like a...
• 10:51
  an easy project that nobody had tackled, which was kind of surprising.
• 10:57
  And so an undergrad that I was working with went out and collected hundreds of data points walking around the city and got to see all parts of New York City.
• 11:10
  We went to Staten Island and tried to find pigeons on Staten Island, which was more difficult than I thought it would be.
• 11:16
  Oh, interesting.
• 11:17
  Yeah.
• 11:18
  Staten Island's pretty suburban.
• 11:19
  Yeah.
• 11:20
  Yeah.
• 11:22
  And we found that in areas with more impervious surface, more roads, fewer trees, less canopy cover, you could approach a pigeon more closely.
• 11:33
  We don't know if this is a behavioral modification that pigeons know that in places like Times Square, if they don't...
• 11:44
  run away, maybe they'll get a food reward, or maybe that humans aren't really a threat, and so they don't really need to exert energy to flee that animal, right?
• 11:54
  Because there's this cost-benefit analysis that each organism is doing as it's deciding, do I stay and continue this behavior that might provide some selection advantage, or do I get away from here because this is a real threat?
• 12:11
  And so in these heavily urbanized areas with lots of people, lots of buildings, lots of roadways, you can approach these pigeons.
• 12:23
  But as soon as you get to places that are...
• 12:27
  that have more tree cover, have fewer people, the pigeons aren't going to allow you to approach.
• 12:34
  Is that a learned behavior?
• 12:36
  That's something that they learn from other individuals in the flock.
• 12:40
  Unfortunately, because we were walking towards these animals and seeing how close we could get, we also then could not capture them.
• 12:48
  Right, yeah.
• 12:49
  Because...
• 12:51
  They were aware.
• 12:52
  The whole point is to see them flee.
• 12:55
  And so we couldn't capture them.
• 12:57
  So we don't know if it's a genetic mechanism or not.
• 13:03
  And, you know, they are responding to cues in their environment.
• 13:07
  My undergrad, Richard, who's now a PhD, he's now a doctor.
• 13:12
  He just defended.
• 13:13
  Congrats, Richard.
• 13:14
  Nice.
• 13:14
  He came up with this great word because, you know, sometimes we'd be going to approach a flock of pigeons and they'd all scatter.
• 13:23
  Like, we don't think we did that.
• 13:25
  We don't think that was us.
• 13:26
  He's like, ah, we were hawk blocked.
• 13:28
  Right.
• 13:29
  down and blocked us from collecting our data point at that location.
• 13:36
  And that happened frequently.
• 13:39
  So we know these hawks were hunting these pigeons, that these pigeons were aware of what predators were around them.
• 13:46
  And so we also ended up looking at predators and found that in places with more peregrine falcons...
• 13:55
  you could more closely approach pigeons and in areas with more red-tailed hawks.
• 14:01
  You couldn't approach pigeons as easily.
• 14:05
  And I was so confused by this.
• 14:07
  I am not an ornithologist.
• 14:11
  I am a pigeon specialist.
• 14:14
  I was so confused by this difference of peregrine falcons and red-tailed hawks, and why would pigeons be responding differently in areas with these.
• 14:23
  But those two predators hunt very differently.
• 14:27
  Peregrine falcons hunt in the air, red-tailed hawks hunt on the ground.
• 14:32
  You know, the pigeons are doing these calculations where they're saying, oh, if there's red-tailed hawks around, I'm just going to get out of here.
• 14:40
  And if there's peregrine falcons around, maybe I'll just kind of stick around a little bit longer.
• 14:45
  Yeah.
• 14:46
  And red-tailed hawks are also notoriously like okay with people being around.
• 14:51
  I had one in Washington Square Park just like swoop down so close to me I could feel the air rush by me.
• 14:58
  Cool.
• 15:00
  And peregrine falcons typically won't get that close to us.
• 15:03
  And so it could also be that pigeons are using people as cover.
• 15:08
  Yeah, that's really interesting to think about the human shield of it all, which we've talked about in another episode with Fran Bonnier thinking about urbanization specifically.
• 15:17
  Like in certain situations, if organisms can get everything they need and humans provide kind of this protection from predators, it can actually be good for their reproductive or their just individual fitness, you know, if they survive and survive.
• 15:29
  So peregrines and red-tails, I guess, are the main predators, at least in North American cities, of pigeons.
• 15:36
  And I'd imagine in other parts of the world, it's other kind of large raptors picking off adults.
• 15:41
  Are there any other predator-prey relationships that are interesting to think about in the context of pigeons in cities?
• 15:50
  So feral cats are probably eating pigeons.
• 15:53
  Right, yeah.
• 15:55
  But unfortunately, we couldn't get data from New York City on where the feral cat populations are.
• 16:01
  Really?
• 16:02
  Like from the city?
• 16:03
  Yeah.
• 16:04
  So New York City actually tracks this.
• 16:06
  And there are cat colony people that know where the cat colonies are and feed the cat colonies.
• 16:14
  New York City tracks this, but they were not willing to share that data with me.
• 16:19
  Interesting.
• 16:20
  Cats are very controversial.
• 16:21
  Cat lovers love cats and bird lovers don't.
• 16:26
  And outdoor cats do lead to the deaths of, you know, billion plus birds a year, plus other things, small mammals, snakes, etc.
• 16:35
  They are a problem.
• 16:36
  Yeah, I guess that makes sense that they would prey on pigeons.
• 16:39
  So pigeons do very well in cities and it's partially because we've created cliffs for them and they are in the wild cliff nesters.
• 16:47
  Could you talk to us a little bit about just the pigeon from egg to fledging and where they build their nests, how they build their nests and what pigeon babies look like?
• 16:58
  So most people, or there's a rumor going around that pigeons are not real.
• 17:03
  Yeah.
• 17:04
  This is something that 20-year-old boys seem to ask me when I come and give guest lectures about pigeons.
• 17:12
  And part of this started because people have never seen baby pigeons, or at least think that they haven't seen baby pigeons.
• 17:21
  And baby pigeons, maybe you don't want to see one.
• 17:24
  They're not very cute.
• 17:26
  They are not.
• 17:28
  They're not like ducklings.
• 17:29
  They're not like little chicks.
• 17:31
  They are pretty weird looking.
• 17:34
  They're usually hatched in clutches of two.
• 17:37
  And both the male and the female are caring for the offspring as they're being raised.
• 17:44
  Those babies, because the parents will produce this...
• 17:49
  This pigeon milk, which is very different than mammal milk.
• 17:54
  It is not secreted by a mammary gland.
• 17:58
  It is produced in the crop and is kind of a cottage cheese-like substance that they're then regurgitating into the baby chick's mouth.
• 18:10
  And, you know, that very fatty, rich substance helps this chick grow up very quickly.
• 18:19
  And so another reason that we might not see these baby birds is because you don't realize necessarily that you're seeing a young individual.
• 18:29
  Oftentimes, people will take a picture and send it to me and say, hey, this pigeon looks really, you know, gross.
• 18:35
  What's going on with it?
• 18:36
  And I'm just like...
• 18:37
  That's just a very young pigeon.
• 18:39
  It hasn't grown into its plumage fully yet.
• 18:42
  Yeah.
• 18:44
  And so that's part of why you think it looks weird.
• 18:50
  the mother and father will kind of co-parent these two chicks, raising them in the nest.
• 18:56
  The nests are not the most beautiful nests that you've ever seen.
• 19:01
  Like hummingbird nests are so intricate and they take the lichen and place it around and they're just beautifully made.
• 19:08
  Pigeons, find a cliff, find a flat place, put a stick or two there so the eggs don't roll off and they are good to go.
• 19:16
  Yeah.
• 19:17
  And, you know, right after I defended my dissertation, I get a phone call from my cousin freaking out.
• 19:25
  And she FaceTimes me and says, a pigeon laid an egg on my bed while I was out of my apartment for the day.
• 19:34
  In New York City?
• 19:35
  Yeah.
• 19:36
  In New York City, she had left the window cracked open a few inches and a pigeon had come in.
• 19:41
  She had put her single stick down on the bed and laid her egg because she found a very nice, you know, comfortable place.
• 19:50
  Yeah.
• 19:51
  Your cousin was lucky to have an expert on the other end of the line to be like, what do I do?
• 19:56
  What do I do?
• 19:56
  She was so happy.
• 19:59
  And I said she could turn it into avocado toast and charge a hipster, you know, an exorbitant amount of money.
• 20:05
  Take it down to Brooklyn.
• 20:06
  Yeah.
• 20:07
  Yeah.
• 20:08
  Yeah.
• 20:08
  Free range pigeon egg.
• 20:11
  Instead, I told her to just dispose of the egg and, you know, put the stick outside and close the window.
• 20:17
  And that, you know, pretty quickly the mother and father would lay another clutch and start to raise the egg.
• 20:26
  a new set of pigeons.
• 20:29
  So they can reproduce about every six weeks.
• 20:32
  Wow.
• 20:32
  Yeah, I was wondering that because there are a lot of pigeons, but they don't lay a lot of eggs per individual.
• 20:37
  But if they can do that rapidly and this pigeon milk thing is just so cool to think about.
• 20:42
  I mean, it's gross in a way, but fascinating.
• 20:46
  I think it evolutionarily...
• 20:48
  Some of the same cells, they're not mammary glands, obviously, because they're birds.
• 20:51
  But there's similar molecular pathways, I think, between the pigeon milk that these birds produce and the milk that mammals produce, which is just amazing.
• 21:02
  And then if you think about like on a bunch of episodes of the podcast, we've talked about like the insect apocalypse and the fact that a lot of insect eating birds are declining because their food resources are going away with for various reasons.
• 21:14
  But pigeons don't need to feed their chicks insects.
• 21:17
  They feed them this stuff they make themselves that they convert maybe donuts into if the adults are eating donuts and making their pigeon milk.
• 21:24
  And so they're like primed to be really, really successful in these habitats that we have like heavily altered.
• 21:31
  It's just so cool to think about.
• 21:34
  It's really awesome that, yeah, that we get to have this bird that's
• 21:38
  that's evolved alongside us that's able to take advantage of our same resources.
• 21:44
  Yeah, totally.
• 21:45
  I mean, along those lines, you mapped the genetics of these feral pigeons.
• 21:48
  And maybe if you could talk about just what the word feral means before we get into this, but you did this across the entire Northeastern US and you found that their population structure mirrors human geography, which is just so interesting.
• 22:02
  So tell us a bit about that research and what you found and what surprised you out of all of that.
• 22:09
  Yeah.
• 22:09
  So when I started working on pigeons, I was like, oh, just like this flight initiation distance study, it's going to be super easy to catch pigeons.
• 22:17
  I was very naive in that.
• 22:21
  It was not that easy to catch pigeons.
• 22:23
  And I went through a whole set of different techniques trying to capture them because I needed a large sample size.
• 22:32
  I needed pigeons from, you know, these six, seven cities all up and down the East Coast and ended up using something called a net gun, which...
• 22:43
  Looks really cool.
• 22:46
  It makes me feel like Spider-Man.
• 22:48
  Yeah.
• 22:48
  It looks like a big flashlight, right?
• 22:52
  And it shoots this net out over the pigeons and captures them, kind of tangles them up.
• 22:59
  And luckily, because just of how doves are, they're pretty calm once you've caught them.
• 23:07
  Yeah, yeah.
• 23:08
  And they'll never bite you, you know, like they're this great...
• 23:13
  organism to work on as soon as you figure out how to catch them.
• 23:16
  Yeah, they're much nicer than a chickadee, which will just peck and peck and peck and sometimes even draw blood.
• 23:21
  Yeah, the cardinals, because they have those beaks to crack open seeds.
• 23:26
  I mean, my finger turned black and blue from a cardinal bite.
• 23:31
  But pigeons, I've stuck my finger in their beak and there's nothing.
• 23:38
  Although there is one breed of pigeon that
• 23:41
  that is slightly aggressive.
• 23:43
  Really?
• 23:43
  Which we can talk about.
• 23:44
  Oh yeah, let's get into pigeon breeds after we talk more about the genetics of all this.
• 23:48
  Because pigeons have this ability to kind of fly and move, I was interested in them across this wide range.
• 23:58
  My PhD advisor actually suggested that I really broadly expand because they are this feral organism that's kind of in all these cities.
• 24:08
  Feral is a complicated term for a lot of people, and there is a lot of disagreement over what feral means.
• 24:18
  To me, broadly, it means an animal that was once, the species was once domesticated, and now it's back kind of in the wild living on its own.
• 24:30
  And I think there's a common misconception about pigeons that they need us to survive.
• 24:37
  And so you see a lot of people feeding pigeons because they feel like the pigeons need us.
• 24:44
  And so if I don't go dump this bag of rice or this bag of donuts, you know, the pigeons won't survive.
• 24:50
  They'll be okay.
• 24:51
  They are still wild animals.
• 24:53
  Yeah, they're resilient.
• 24:55
  They are.
• 24:56
  And so these feral organisms, you know, are just living alongside us.
• 25:04
  And...
• 25:07
  Boston down to Washington, D.C. is known as the Bosch Wash Corridor or the Northeast Mega City.
• 25:15
  And it, you know, contains 17% of the U.S. landmass.
• 25:20
  So not a lot of the U.S. landmass, but like 53 million people in this area.
• 25:26
  So it's super heavily urbanized.
• 25:29
  I collected blood from pigeons, from hundreds of pigeons that I caught all across this area, and then basically built 23andMe, but for pigeons.
• 25:41
  So, you know, figuring out who's related to who, who is distant cousins with who else.
• 25:48
  And then was able to kind of map out how that family tree mapped back onto the landscape.
• 25:58
  And I found that pigeons from Boston and Providence...
• 26:03
  were genetically kind of different from pigeons in New York and further south.
• 26:08
  And that was weird.
• 26:10
  That was not at all what I was expecting.
• 26:12
  I was expecting each city to kind of be this urban island because you typically don't see pigeons in the suburbs.
• 26:21
  But then when I started to look at this region more, this light at night, when you light up that region at night, you see that there is actually massive connectivity between New York and Washington, D.C. And then across Connecticut, you get this like suburban forested area.
• 26:42
  And then you have Providence and Boston.
• 26:46
  And so what I think is going on is that the pigeons like hit Connecticut and they're like, this is weird.
• 26:53
  Why would I cross this forest?
• 26:55
  I'm not a forest bird.
• 26:56
  I'm not a forest bird.
• 26:58
  I don't do forests.
• 26:59
  Forests are dangerous, right?
• 27:02
  There's other birds in there.
• 27:03
  There are other things that could hunt me.
• 27:05
  I'm good.
• 27:06
  I'm just going to go back to the city.
• 27:15
  you know, in the cities that something about just this big block of suburbanization is kind of preventing the pigeons from wanting to move.
• 27:26
  And it was not at all what I was expecting.
• 27:29
  And I am super excited to hopefully expand this project across the U.S. to see if that pattern holds.
• 27:36
  Yeah, it's really interesting.
• 27:37
  I think we come into things as scientists with ideas and when the pattern doesn't match the idea, it flips the way we need to think about it.
• 27:46
  And the fact that forests are likely barriers or these large forested areas, urban forests, in the case that you're talking about, would prevent a bird from moving if it's more of this cliff-dwelling, urban-adapted species.
• 27:58
  Really, really interesting.
• 27:59
  You're doing this work in...
• 28:03
  this very open environment, right?
• 28:05
  And so people are walking by you and asking, what are you doing?
• 28:10
  What are you doing, crazy lady?
• 28:11
  Why do you have a net gun and a flashlight?
• 28:14
  Yeah, and bags of pigeons, right?
• 28:17
  I would take like the paper bags from Whole Foods and when the pigeon would come out of the net, they'd go in a paper bag, kind of dark, safe, calm space.
• 28:26
  And so I'd have like, you know, 10 paper bags lined up.
• 28:32
  And then I'd be pulling a pigeon out of each one.
• 28:34
  Yeah.
• 28:36
  And I looked kind of odd.
• 28:38
  And, of course, in New York City, that's not the weirdest thing anybody has seen that day.
• 28:43
  And so the New Yorkers would just kind of pass me by.
• 28:47
  But in other cities, I would get stopped and asked, what are you doing?
• 28:50
  I would get asked if I was handing out food.
• 28:53
  And then I'd have to explain, well, you don't really want to eat city pigeon because there's lead level poisoning in many of them.
• 28:58
  Right.
• 28:59
  So if you're going to eat squab, you want farm-raised squab, I wouldn't recommend eating anything out of these American cities at least.
• 29:09
  Yeah, and we alluded to this earlier, but pigeons were important on the origin of species.
• 29:15
  There's whole parts of the book dedicated to the speed with which artificial selection can change one into many.
• 29:21
  And there are many different kinds of pigeon breeds, right?
• 29:25
  Yeah.
• 29:26
  Right.
• 29:26
  So most people kind of think of when you say breeds, they think of something like dog breeds, right?
• 29:33
  Yeah.
• 29:34
  And as diverse as dog breeds are, pigeon breeds are equally diverse, if not more.
• 29:41
  Yeah.
• 29:42
  And there's tons of different breeds of pigeons.
• 29:47
  Everything –
• 29:48
  From these little chubby guys that almost look like teddy bears to ones with curly feathers.
• 29:57
  Sometimes they'll have a big fan tail that almost looks like a peacock's tail.
• 30:03
  They'll have feathered feet.
• 30:04
  They come in all different colors from all white to all black with iridescent's.
• 30:11
  And sometimes they have like a naked neck, which looks really weird, or they'll have a really long limbs, like long legs.
• 30:19
  Yeah, there's those really tall ones.
• 30:21
  And the ones with the tiny, tiny little bill.
• 30:24
  Right.
• 30:24
  Tiny, tiny bill that have to be hand fed.
• 30:27
  Oh my God, do they?
• 30:28
  Yeah.
• 30:29
  That's crazy.
• 30:30
  The breeders will hand feed them.
• 30:32
  And so there's all this diversity that we've been able to breed into pigeons, which is
• 30:39
  really cool.
• 30:40
  And in the same way that we have dog shows, we have pigeon shows.
• 30:45
  And I highly recommend going to a pigeon show if you get the chance.
• 30:50
  The people there are super interesting.
• 30:52
  They love pigeons.
• 30:54
  They're
• 30:56
  You know, just all kinds of people, people that grew up on farms, kind of grew up doing this, people that got into it later in life.
• 31:08
  And, you know, I was offered so many pigeons by these people.
• 31:12
  Like, if you want to get started on pigeon breeding, we will give you your first 10 pigeons for free.
• 31:17
  And you never took them up on it?
• 31:19
  I live in an apartment, Scott.
• 31:21
  I mean, that sounds like you could just do it on the roof, right?
• 31:24
  Come on.
• 31:26
  We've reached the part of the show that we call That's BS or That's Bird Stuff, where we give our guests an opportunity to debunk a myth that ruffles their feathers.
• 31:33
  So Liz, what do you want to call BS on?
• 31:36
  I want to call BS on the fact that pigeons are dirty.
• 31:39
  I'm so sick of people telling me that pigeons are gross, dirty birds and that I'm going to contract rabies from them.
• 31:49
  That is wrong.
• 31:50
  So for anybody out there, pigeons do not have rabies.
• 31:55
  They can't have rabies.
• 31:56
  Their body temperature is not a temperature that rabies can survive at.
• 32:00
  Yeah.
• 32:01
  It does not survive in birds.
• 32:03
  It is mammal specific.
• 32:04
  You are a mammal, a pigeon is a bird.
• 32:07
  It's not going to give you rabies.
• 32:10
  Awesome.
• 32:10
  Well, thanks so much for joining us on the podcast today.
• 32:12
  It's always such a pleasure to talk to you.
• 32:14
  And I'm happy to have learned much more about pigeons.
• 32:17
  So thanks for taking the time.
• 32:19
  Thank you for having me.
• 32:24
  Birds are dinosaurs and around here we like our snacks.
• 32:26
  So we end each episode with a dinosaur nugget.
• 32:28
  Today's nugget is pigeons are so much more than rats with wings.
• 32:31
  They aren't actually dirty, although they do carry high levels of lead because of the pollution we've exposed them to.
• 32:37
  They're great parents and they feed their chicks milk.
• 32:39
  And if you're new to birdwatching, pigeons are a great way to start.
• 32:42
  No binoculars, no app, no hike.
• 32:43
  Just look down.
• 32:45
  That's a wrap on this week's episode, OK, But Pigeons.
• 32:47
  If you're now slightly less likely to call a pigeon a rat with wings, our work here is done.
• 32:51
  Leave us a rating, drop a review, hit like, and subscribe.
• 32:54
  And tell a friend who still needs converting.
• 32:56
  We'll catch you next time.
• 32:57
  Bye.
• 33:02
  OK, But Birds is hosted by Scott Taylor with production and creative by Zach Carl.