Strigiformology (OWLS) Part 2 with R. J. Gutiérrez

We’re back with Dr. R. J. “Rocky” Gutiérrez to answer listeners’ questions on owls. How much wisdom lies behind those big, immovable eyes? Are owls good or bad omens? What’s their proclivity for snatching hats? Is The Staircase owl theory plausible? Is it ok to hoot back at them? What do you mean one of their toes is reversible? This episode’s got the answers, plus info on owl migration, conservation, burrowing, disco dancing, and more.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alie Ward?

  How's your ponytail looking? Maybe like a little thinner than it used to? We've talked about this in our menopause episode. At some point, it's bound to happen to all of us. So if you're ready for thicker, fuller hair, start your free online visit today at forhers.com/ologies for personalized care. So that's F-O-R-H-E-R-S.com/ologies. Individual results may vary. Featured products include compounded drug products, which the FDA does not approve or verify for safety, effectiveness, or quality. Prescription required. Price varies based on product and subscription plan. See website for full details, restrictions, and important safety information. Peppa Pig is your preschooler's best friend. Give the gift of bike riding confidence this year and help Peppa learn to ride her bike. Kids can imagine learning to ride a bike

• 0:45Alie Ward?

  with the Ready Pedal Go Peppa Bicycle Playset. Put Peppa's helmet on, attach the push stick to her bike, and push to make her pedal. Ready Pedal Go Peppa and more from Peppa Pig are now available at all major retailers this holiday season.

• 1:05Alie Ward?

  Oh, trips are full of unexpected discoveries. Maybe you see a sea slug, or you find out that your friend still sleeps with a stuffed animal. But when it comes to your vacation rental, there should not be any surprises. When you book a Verbo vacation rental, if what you expect isn't what you get, Verbo Care has you covered. If something's broken or just not right, Verbo will work to make it right. Plus, you get 24/7 live human support with every booking. Grab your stuffy, we're going on vacay. So book today on the Verbo app. If you know, you're Verbo. Terms apply. See verbo.com/trust for details. Oh, hey, it's still the guy who runs the local board game night, hoping someone shows up at the pizza place to game. Ally Ward, boy hootie. Once again, it's part two of sugar formology, owls.

• 1:50Alie Ward?

  Many of you noted last week that I missed the opportunity to say allergies, and that made me feel bad because you're right. Also, you were like, does this have the same root word as an Italian witch? And I'm glad that I have the chance to clear that up in this episode, which we do, especially since I am an Italian lady who collects rocks, and I have animal teeth in jars. But if you haven't listened to part one, I don't know Why you're here first, because you gotta go back and you gotta meet Rocky, you gotta find out what an owl is. So go back to part one. We'll see you back here when you're finished. Everyone else, you made it in order. You waited a week and now we're at the thrilling conclusion of Owls. But before we swoop into it, thank you to all the patrons who submitted questions for this episode via patreon.com/ologies. This entire episode is all your questions and you too can join for $1 a month if you're

• 2:35Alie Ward?

  not. Thank you to everyone who's out there at Ologies merch from ologiesmerch.com. And if you need kid-friendly, no swearing episodes, you can find them in their own feed called Smallologies, wherever you get your podcasts. It's also linked in the show notes. And thank you, of course, to folks who review the show for $0 and you know I read them all, such as this freshy from Escobee who wrote, "A litmus test. Slip in amazing information about slug dongs at a dinner party and see whose eyes light up. That's your new friend." Thank you, Ally Ward. Escobee, you can corner me near the spinach dip any day. Okay, so let's get into Strigiformology Owls, Part Two, wherein we will discuss what to say

• 3:15Alie Ward?

  to an owl, what not to say, exorcist heads, omens, wisdom, nesting season, stolen hats, homicide trials, the spotted owl versus barred owl, great debate, this guest's favorite owl, and the one he wants to see the most in real life, if a group of them is actually called a parliament, and so much more, with your favorite owl guy, Strigiformologist Dr. R.J. Rocky Gutierrez, whom we love.

• 4:01Alie Ward?

  Can I ask you some questions from listeners? Are you doing okay? I know I've kept you.

• 4:04Speaker 01

  No, I've got all the time you want.

• 4:07Alie Ward?

  Okay, amazing. I love this. Okay, some questions from listeners. And we have so many good ones.

• 4:14Speaker 02

  Hi, Ally. This is Leilani Ramirez from Los Angeles. This is my first time asking a question, so I'm really excited to learn more about owls. I had a question about their hands, feet. I'm not really sure what you would call them, but I guess their talons. I've heard that they can rotate one of their talons. So they can have them in either a two-two or a three-one configuration, which I guess is why they walk so differently from so many other birds. I was wondering if all owls have that or if there are some that don't? And how exactly that adaptation is beneficial for them? Thank you so much.

• 4:55Alie Ward?

  So yeah, do they have four claws that they switch around to configurations?

• 5:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, they have four claws. And the person is correct, but it's the outer toe is reversible. So they can put two forward and two back. And so when they come down, they can like boom, grab them on and have a much more secure grip on whatever they grab a hold of.

• 5:20Alie Ward?

  So they can go three up top, one on bottom? Or they can swing that thing around for a two and two? So like three dagger fingers and a spike thumb? Or like a spock claw of death? We'll chat more about it in terms of forensic science in a bit.

• 5:36Speaker 01

  So that is one of the unique features of these things that they can in fact have that reversible outer toe and have two forward and two back. And the other interesting things about about owls and their talons is they're usually adapted to the size of the prey that they take. When you see a great big owl, like a great gray owl, they have relatively small talons because they're taking meadow voles and mice and small mammals. And so they don't need great big talons. And you look something like a spotted owl, which is. Quite a bit smaller than a great gray. They have really big talons.

• 6:19Speaker 01

  And, and they're catching an animal that's a third their size of wood rats is their primary prey. So they're catching huge animals in relationship. And so it's like four stilettos going right into the body of, or eight, actually, when you talk about both talons. And again, you know, depending on the size of the owl, they have different strength at which they can apply to the prey. And people have actually measured this. So the amount of force that is required to release, say, a little owl, like a burrowing owl, is something called five newtons. Well, that's no more than saying it's like, you know, 1.1 pounds pressure.

• 7:01Speaker 01

  So if you apply 1.1 pounds of force against this, you can open up the talons of a little tiny owl. And what it feels like is somebody pinching you. Like one time an owl hit the window. My wife, Katie, she went out to retrieve it. I actually didn't look at it. She just saw it was a bird. And the first thing, and this is a tip for the audience, if a bird ever hits your window, and you don't know if it's alive or dead, just gently pick it up by the whole body, put it in a box on top of a towel, and then close the box up and put it in a quiet, dark place. And just leave it there for, you know, four or five hours.

• 7:43Speaker 01

  Because owls are amazingly resilient when they hit windows. If they don't outright kill them, oftentimes they won't die of shock if you put them in there and they have a chance to relax and be quiet.

• 7:56Alie Ward?

  And always a good idea, non-pros, to call your local wildlife rehabber as soon as you can to get some advice too. But yeah, many say that a quiet, dark box, or even a paper bag, helps the little birdies calm down. And if you start to hear like the

• 8:14Alie Ward?

  Of pitter patter of feet inside, they may be awake and ready to kind of pop out and then chill out. But in that time, they likely don't need food or water. But if you provide it, don't try to jam it down their little throats like a beer bong, because they could choke or they'd be pissed at you. Also, to prevent the bird strikes in the first place, you can look into things like window films. They have like dots or patterns, or you can use a glass marker, I read, to put a grid of dots on your own window. You could turn the lights off at night, you can hang things up in your windows. And according to this 2023 paper, evidence,

• 8:53Alie Ward?

  consequences, and angle of strike of bird window collisions, up to 5.2 billion bird fatalities may be happening in just the United States, with potentially billions more worldwide every year. So we'll link some resources on our website, because we all want birds to like us. And it can still happen, even to professionals, even to professional bird people. But you can help these little fellows out, like KT did after this strike.

• 9:20Speaker 01

  Well, anyway, she picked up this little owl and he snatched her, you know, and grabbed her by the finger, you know. And so then she realized, oh, I got a live one here. So it was a little pygmy owl. And she pulled the talons apart and then went into the house. And of course, it lived, which we're happy about. But other species, like the great horned owl, when it latches onto something, it takes about 30 pounds of pressure to pull them apart. And so a spotted owl is like 15, 18 pounds of pressure. Now, one time, we were working in New Mexico, and a graduate student from another university had called me up and asked me if I would show him how to catch owls and work with owls, because he wanted to do a

• 10:05Speaker 01

  study on them. And his major professor was not an owl person. And I said, sure. And of course, this happens a lot in academia. Students from other universities will call up somebody and ask them for some assistance. And very typically, everybody helps everybody else, most of the time. And so I went out to New Mexico, because I wanted to get some blood and tissue samples for a genetic study I was doing with my colleague, George Baraklau. But to make a long story short, his major professor wanted to see us catching owl. And so we went and caught this owl and he finally caught it. And I ran over to get it. So I just grabbed its foot and it just latched on to me.

• 10:48Speaker 01

  And it put its talons all the way through the fat part of my hand between my forefinger and my thumb.

• 10:54Alie Ward?

  Ouch.

• 10:55Speaker 01

  And there's, of course, there's blood everywhere. And the kid's major professor, he walks up looking at us and he says, does that hurt?

• 11:06Speaker 01

  No, I said, I said, no, it doesn't hurt at all. But when you start pulling this thing apart, you know, you have to be very careful because you don't want to hurt the owl. But you have to apply this pressure. And you can just see the owl looking at you and thinking, I am not letting go of you unless you let go of me.

• 11:25Alie Ward?

  Oh, wow.

• 11:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that that happens, you know.

• 11:29Alie Ward?

  You're just in a tense standoff.

• 11:32Speaker 01

  You're not a true owl or unless you get nailed.

• 11:35Alie Ward?

  Okay, but what if you are say pet sized? Wondered Dr. Primo Delacata, a retired organ grinder, as did other patrons Shayna S., Allison Menard, and Nikki Lawrence, who wanted to know if the spiky jacket small dogs wear really can deter an owl. Nikki Lawrence also mentioned that they are concerned about a local muskrat getting attacked by an owl. So the issue of how much a larger owl can lift in its hook talons seems hotly debated. And I found a lot of conflicting information, but the general advice seems to be, keep your little guys on a leash unless they're a wild muskrat. But the consensus is on the spiky vest for little dogs that it can't hurt. At least it can't hurt as much as a bird can.

• 12:19Alie Ward?

  And now that we know that, I would like to take a moment to share some stories from listeners who wrote in via patreon.com slash ologies because they were good ones. Lauren Cuff noted that, I live in Vancouver, B.C., and there's a park where barred owls have been known to dive bomb humans, sometimes even scraping their talons and causing injuries. Catherine Buckley said, my dad got swooped at and attacked by an owl on his walk a few days ago. Is this normal? Was it the fact that he's bald? Catherine notes that he did get a tetanus shot afterward. And is completely fine. And so is the owl. So that's all good. Ads, the hermeneutologists wanted us to know that when driving a four wheeler on a farm one night at the last minute with their headlamp, they saw a great horned owl come at their face with claws uplazing.

• 13:00Alie Ward?

  Ads says, I did get some nasty cuts and a scar on my chin. Is this normal behavior? Was it attracted to the light and thought my face was prey? It did fly away very quickly when my arms went crazy, Ads says. And then Kathleen Carlson said, a couple of years ago, I was trail running in the winter, February, on Vancouver Island before sunrise, which already Kathleen, like, good, good for you. And then an owl swooped right over us and made contact with my friend's head with its wing. We turned around and it followed us through the tree canopy for about 500 meters down the trail. Mateo Orr recalled that one time, an eastern screech owl, male, chased me for several hundred yards. One of the highlights of their life, they say. Anyway, do owls do stuff like that because they like it? Do they like to play?

• 13:44Alie Ward?

  Firecat55 said, sometimes they come into my house. Wonder what that's all about? Firecat55, so am I. What? Chris Curious asked, why do barn owls act so weird around people? Ariel Embie shared that at their college, there was an owl that was famed for swooping down on students in the night, and it was truly terrifying. Andy Pepper, Michelle, and Emily Tierney all had similar queries, with Emily writing, longtime listener, first time caller. Why do owls steal hats?

• 14:12Speaker 01

  Do owls like to go after a hat? No, actually, I don't think so. I think what they're observing is a territorial behavior or a defense of young. Some owls are very, very aggressive. And if you get near their young or get near their nest, like great horned owls and ural owls are notorious for this, that if you get near their nest or their young, they attack you. And so oftentimes they're coming for your head or your eyes, and they hit you in the head. And so very often, people working on owls, well, helmets or goggles or big hats to prevent them from getting wounded on the, on the head.

• 14:54Alie Ward?

  Okay, I found some recent YouTube footage of a person jogging on a trail in a redwood forest, and their account is called Run From Owls. Let's take a listen to a video titled Owl Attack.

• 15:12Speaker 04

  There he is again.

• 15:14Speaker 04

  You got my hat?

• 15:20Speaker 04

  Are you serious?

• 15:21Alie Ward?

  So that owl thinks you're a big weird ape creature, which to be fair, we are, and it wants you to leave its fuzzy babies alone. So yes, they are very serious.

• 15:32Speaker 01

  So that's what they're really going after. They're not really going after your hat. They're going after you. Then they just happen to hit your hat.

• 15:39Alie Ward?

  Well, a few people, and this information was new to me, but Penny Loader Gomez and James Moorhead wanted to know. Well, Liz Tim asked, did the owl do it? If you know, you know. Penny Loader wanted to know what you think about the owl defense in a homicide investigation called The Staircase? Have you heard of this?

• 16:00Speaker 01

  I have not.

• 16:01Alie Ward?

  I guess there was a famous homicide case where someone was implicated in the death of his wife, but then they found what could be talon marks on her head. She may have been attacked by an owl, but it was some very big crime story about whether or not this man who was up on a homicide trial for his wife, if actually an owl had attacked her and she fell down some stairs after she was popped by an owl. So that was news to me, too. It's interesting that that does happen. If you're in their territory, that they could say, hey, get out of here. I got babies around here.

• 16:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, one of my colleagues from Finland, who works on ural holes, Bert de Sarrala, he had a video of him going up to a nest box and he was going to ban the babies. He's on the ladder. And this yawl came up and grabbed him right on the butt and is trying to pull him off of the ladder. So.

• 17:01Speaker 01

  And he starts saying he's rubbing his butt because, you know, they hurt and they get you. So it's not implausible that an owl could have hit somebody like that and caused them to lose their balance and fall down there. But, you know, I just don't know the details of why the owl would be inside a house.

• 17:21Alie Ward?

  I think they think it happened right outside and then maybe she was bleeding, started ascending the stairs up to her bedroom and then collapsed or something. Okay, I brushed up on this because many of you, Penny Loder, Gomez, Liz Tim, James Moorhead, asked about this. And the hypothesis in the death of Kathleen Peterson was put forward by her neighbor Larry Pollard, who had seen owls a lot in the area. So babies typically hatch in late winter and early spring, but at the time of Kathleen's death in December 2001, a pair of birds may already have been guarding a nesting site. So forensic teams did find a microscopic feather in her hair, as well as a small splinter of wood. And some autopsy

• 18:04Alie Ward?

  reports show several gashes on her scalp in the shape of three with one below it, which ornithologists say does fit the pattern of talons on an owl. Now, it's a longer story. The victim's husband had also been implicated in a family friend's death who fell down a staircase years before, and he did serve some time for his wife's death, which was thought to be a homicide, but he's currently free. And if you've heard of the documentary, The Staircase, if that's your thing, it covers this whole tragedy, but you're not going to hear a lot about owls in it because the forensic evidence that could have showed an owl's involvement was discovered too late to be included in the trial. So the theory,

• 18:44Alie Ward?

  though, is covered extensively in Titty Smith's 2023 book called Death by Talons. But Kathleen's death and the possible owl involvement remains a mystery, and sadly, kind of a punchline. But owls, are you serious? Yes, they are. Sienna Redkite, Faith Stemer, Rob Hever, Bonnie M. Rutherford, all wanted to know. Well, Faith wrote, yes, owls. Lot of exclamation points. Do any owls migrate?

• 19:13Speaker 01

  Yes, they do. And some of them show pneumatic behavior. So for example, there's a phenomenon called eruptions that the snowy owl and hawk owl exhibit when there's a what we think of failure of their primary food in the far north and they move south and invade the United States. And in northern Minnesota, at times I've driven out when I was on the faculty at the University of Minnesota, we had an eruption one year and my wife and I drove up about 25 minutes north of the Twin Cities and we saw 27 great gray owls and three hawk owls in three hours.

• 19:51Alie Ward?

  Wow.

• 19:51Speaker 01

  They just come en masse. So that's sort of a form of migration to move. Some species like the spotted owl will show seasonal movements where they they will leave a higher country and then go back during the winter and then come back in the springtime. But not all of them do that. So it's not a guaranteed thing. Flimulated owls will migrate. Tangman's owls or boreal owls will migrate in Finland. One of my greatest experiences was being invited by some Finnish scientists to trap tangamon's owls in north of the Arctic Circle. And we set up a triangle of nets, put a fake owl in the middle

• 20:34Speaker 01

  and turned on a tape recorder and sat back and we're playing this call and the northern lights are right on top of us. And we went over there, we had like eight boreal owls stuck in the nets. And I mean, it was fantastic. And they were on their migratory route south. So yes, some owls do migrate, some show eruptions, some populations, proportions of birds migrate, others don't. So a lot of variability there.

• 21:02Alie Ward?

  What is your passport like? Do they have to add pages to it?

• 21:07Speaker 01

  I usually just get new ones.

• 21:11Alie Ward?

  Sounds like you and Katie have been so many places.

• 21:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, you know, owls are always on the top of the list.

• 21:21Alie Ward?

  A few people, Mary of the Grapefruit, Taylor R., and Sarah Green, wanted to know, is a group of owls actually called a parliament, or is that just pop culture?

• 21:30Speaker 01

  No, that's correct.

• 21:31Alie Ward?

  Is it really?

• 21:32Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 21:33Alie Ward?

  Do you ever use that in the field? Like, we drove three hours and we saw a parliament of owls.

• 21:39Speaker 01

  Well, I never have, and I don't know anybody else that has, because we usually don't see a big group of owls like that. But you probably could call it a parliament of owls when you're looking at six or seven gray owls, or gray gals, and a hawk owl, and a snowy owl in the same field, you know? So that might be a parliament of owls, although I never thought of it that way. But that is true. That's the correct term.

• 22:04Alie Ward?

  And I know you want to know who decides these things, and evidently, it's been traced to the Book of Saint Albans, written by a lady who was really good at hawking and hunting, and her name was Dame Juliana Berners. She was also a nun, and the year was 1486. 1486. Let's just do it. Let's read from the Book of Saint Albans and list a couple of groups of animals: an embarrassment of pandas, a passel of opossums, a conspiracy of lemurs, the well-known murder of crows, a committee of mongooses, a thunder of hippopotami, a romp of otters, and so many others. What a romp it is. And as we mentioned in the luteinology episode about otters, nature writer Nicholas Lund has gone on record and

• 22:47Alie Ward?

  reported that, no, these terms are not widely used scientifically, but I say use them or lose them, folks. Parliament of owls, it is. And Dame Berners is a legend to have made an 800-year impression on the vernacular. Speaking of remembrances, many of you needed to know about owl brains and intelligence and wisdom.

• 23:05Alie Ward?

  Emma D. Carvalho, Maggie Hibbits, Lauren Murphy has Hydro, Ariel Vansant, Sarah Chaney, Tamara Coughton-Ho, Ruby Gordon, Julia Loves Fun Facts, Ashley Kay, Elizabeth Wester's friend Brandy, Ray Bebe, Sienna Hope, Kaiton Rossow, and first time question askers Jade Green, Owl Lover Molly Logston, Jenny Yu, and Kai, who asked, "Some friends say they are really stupid. What's the lowdown?" Now that we've talked about their eyes, what else is in their skull? Striving to Thrive asked, "Do owls remember and recognize human faces?" There are a lot of people wanting to know, in Sarah Chaney's words, "Are they really smart? Is that flim flam or true?" Jennifer Grogan said, "I've heard that owls actually aren't that smart as birds go, in part because their eyeballs fill up too much of their skull to be much room for brains."

• 23:50Alie Ward?

  Kathleen Sacks said, "In mythology, owls are supposed to represent wisdom, but I've heard rumors from people that rescue owls that they are profoundly dumb." What are they working with up top?

• 23:59Speaker 01

  I think it's best to say that owls are no smarter or no dumber than any other bird.

• 24:06Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 24:06Speaker 05

  Good. A diplomatic answer.

• 24:08Speaker 01

  They're just birds and they are predators. So they are so focused on the things that they look at. I think that is one of these other illusions that when people see that staring and the lack of movement and the big eyes, you think they're really contemplating something deep.

• 24:30Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 24:31Speaker 01

  But they're just saying to themselves, "Can I kill you? Can I eat you? That's what they're... Are you, are you, are you small enough that I can actually handle you? I think that's what they're thinking. But they're really not any, no smarter, dumber than any other bird.

• 24:48Alie Ward?

  Well, on the brains of a lot of our listeners, Vin, Haley Bate, Nicole Campbell, Lauren Cooper, Little Boots Caligula, Valby Listening, Anna Wolf, Shannon Cody, Mouse Paxton, Lauren Kent, Ellie Brown, and Hannah Riedel, all asked. Anna Wolf asked, "Why do they have such awkward legs?" A mouse asked, "Why are their legs like that?" And Nicole asked, "Why are their long ass legs hidden?" I think it went around the internet that like, an owl doesn't have short, squatty legs. If you were to stand the owl up, they got big, long ones. What's going on?

• 25:24Speaker 01

  Well, I think what's happening is that they don't have particularly long legs.

• 25:28Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 25:29Speaker 01

  But they appear even much shorter because they're covered in feathers. Many people think that that is an adaptation to avoid being bitten. So when they grab prey, one of the first things they do is reach down and crush the back of the skull or break the neck of the prey so it doesn't bite them. And I've caught owls and seen many owls sitting on the perches where there's cuts on their feet so that you know that they're getting injured. So some people think that those feathers that actually make their legs appear shorter is really an adaptation to avoid being bitten. Now, in some cases, like the snow owl, it almost certainly serves as an adaptation

• 26:12Speaker 01

  to cold as well because they have these cold areas that they live in.

• 26:16Alie Ward?

  Kaia Messenger said, "Owls are my favorite animal. I've always wondered, why do they do that little dance where they look like they're at a disco? And why are they so darn cute doing it? Do they do a little like hoppy, hoppy, hoppy kind of a thing?"

• 26:31Speaker 01

  It's hard to know exactly what she's talking about, but I can think of a couple of things. One is they do some threat displays in which they raise a wing up or they go like this where they bring both wings up. And that might be something like that. Other times, they do shake their feathers and move their wings. So it kind of looks like they're bee-bopping all around.

• 26:56Alie Ward?

  And if you're thinking of an owl head bobbing and weaving or the fact that an owl can keep its head steady, kind of like a gimbal while its bod moves all around, this is called motion parallax. And it has to do with that ocular anatomy, AKA the weird sausage eyes in tubes that we covered in part one. So if you can't move your fixed eyes around, you gotta move your head. And people just, they assume you're grooving, so let them. Now, speaking of tubes and pipes, patron Genetosaur mentioned that, "Growing up in Saskatchewan, we had burrowing owls in our pasture. So cute, so tiny." And Elise Young wondered about little owls. And side note, the tiniest is the elf owl, which is native to the American Southwest

• 27:39Alie Ward?

  and Mexico, which lives in little woodpecker holes in big cacti. And it has white eyebrows, just like Julia Fox, and it's very adorable. But back to the burrows. Danny the Dino said, "One time, my friend and I found a burrowing owl sitting on the ground, totally still, three feet from a highway." Daniela Napolitano, Jennifer Zahurinak, Anna Wolf, all had burrowing owl questions. And Heathcliff asked, what is the best owl? And why is it the burrowing owl?

• 28:03Alie Ward?

  What about the ones that we won't see maybe roosting up high? Why do some of them burrow? Anna Beatrice Mares Peseiro wanted to know, what's up with those owls who live in burrows in the ground? Do they nest in trees as well? Their university campus in Brazil has a lot of them. I mean, I've seen sometimes when they're re-released in the wild and they just put them on the ground and then they hop in a hole. And just one after another, it's like a clown car in reverse, but with owls. Why are some of them in the ground?

• 28:34Speaker 01

  Well, really, there's only one species that nests in the ground, but it has a very wide distribution. That's the burrowing owl. So they're found from Canada all the way to Argentina. And they nest in coffer holes and prairie dog holes. They can dig their own holes. So they're the only one that actually does nest in the ground. And you can encourage them to nest in areas that are grasslands. They're grassland species. They don't nest in trees. That you can actually build burrows for them. You can dig holes and put little tubes in there, like PVC pipes, and they'll go in there and use these things. And I've seen them use irrigation pipes. And yeah, burrowing owls are just cool little critters.

• 29:18Alie Ward?

  That's so cute.

• 29:19Speaker 01

  I've seen them in Brazil, Argentina, virtually every, every South American country I've been in, I've seen burrowing owls.

• 29:25Alie Ward?

  Do they need to have a hole and then a pipe to get to the hole? Like a bagpipe, kind of, where you've got a tunnel and then a hole underground? Or do they just dig? Are they just like into the tunnel itself?

• 29:38Speaker 01

  Well, you know, when they use other species tunnels, they'll often go down there and create a cavity within there. And they can use these things extensively. And they don't have feathers on their legs because they're mainly insects eaters. All they do, they will eat some small mammals. They run down these things just like they're running on a little race, you know, down, down the holes. And they can, almost any kind of a hole, they can use as an access point to get down into these holes and enlarge them at the end.

• 30:12Alie Ward?

  I've never seen one, but I really would love to. And you know, you mentioned that they go all the way from Canada down to Argentina. Rowland wanted to know, can you tell us anything about owls and folklore and mythology? I think they were considered a death omen in Welsh folklore, but they'd love to know how different cultures view them. And Joyful Spitfire, Bennett Vanderbach, Jenna Congdon, Clur, Ted Visian, Adzy Interminologist, so many people wanted to know about culture and owls.

• 30:44Speaker 01

  You know, I anticipated this question. And so from my own experience, I know that's true because I, my wife and I travel a lot. You go to Africa and people are very adverse to owls. It's a funny way I discovered this initially in that I always try to buy a little owl carving somewhere that's local. And I just, you just can't find them in Africa. You know, maybe in South Africa you can, but Uganda, Ghana, you're just not, it's not going to happen. Well, I mean, you might be able to find them, but it's difficult. And so I did quite a bit of reading and I realized that the literature and the examples are so extensive that it's almost mind boggling.

• 31:29Speaker 01

  But the way I think we can handle this is to look at some examples. In a cave in southern France, Chavé Cave, a famous cave where there are these early cave drawings of hominids, of early people that date back to about 30,000 years, there is an owl painted on the wall.

• 31:54Alie Ward?

  Ooh.

• 31:55Speaker 01

  And the interesting thing about that owl is that its head shows the 180 degree rotation.

• 32:02Alie Ward?

  How does it do that?

• 32:03Speaker 01

  Because they just basically, you can see the stripes going down the back of the owl and the head is turned around and facing, the eyes are facing you. And so they recognized that this was unique even back then. And again, because of that, I think that head twisting is one of the reasons why they, some people might have. Think of them as sinister because you know, the poltergeist, a little kid, you know, head swinning around in a that's like the owl, you know, reversing it.

• 32:32Alie Ward?

  And no, I know my horror babies, it didn't happen in poltergeist that I know of, but Rocky is referring to the poltergeist kind of demon entity in the exorcism that swiveled Linda Blair's young, tender head around like a lazy Susan. But of course, it is inherently eerie for any kind of animal to do this, like the visual of a turntable cabeza. And we've seen what cinephiles call the exorcist head trope in everything from Shrek to Beetlejuice. It's in the Lego movie, it's in Winnie the Pooh, but you can also witness this surreal horror in sloths, which can rotate theirs around 270 degrees. And little cuties called tarsiers, which look like a labubu with a broken neck. Oh, and of course, the owls.

• 33:17Speaker 01

  And in early Aboriginal cave drawings and in Australia, owls have been a part of mythology of humans for a long time. And then you go into the early literature of civilizations and Jewish mythology, for example, that the owl is associated with Lethith, the presumed wife of Adam. And the owl is often associated with her as a, as a force of darkness or evil or a screech owl nighttime. And other religions like Hindus have a more positive view of owls because often you'll see various gods writing owls as their venaha,

• 34:03Speaker 01

  their, their transport animal. And then you look at in like European cultures, they mentioned Welsh culture, that you see through time that perceptions of owls has changed. At times they're viewed as bad. And these change to where they view them positively.

• 34:26Speaker 06

  What's up with that?

• 34:26Speaker 01

  And I think it all has to do with the fact that here's a creature that spends its time at night, moving around, makes all kinds of weird noises. You know, if you listen to some of them, they're just totally bizarre sounding little guys, like that little long whiskered owl that the philoploons or these special feathers they have around their beaks so that they can feel things that are close. Because there's farsighted owls and they can't see things very close to them. So they actually feel the prey with their little feathers on their face. And they have a sound like something like this.

• 35:09Speaker 01

  And when they're making that sound, you know, you're going, what, what is this weird thing? And of course, the barn owls are famous.

• 35:26Speaker 01

  And when, when people who probably in early human history were living in trees or hiding out in caves, or, I mean, spending the night in trees, because if they were on the ground, they got ate. Or they built a campfire to ward off critters. You can see why this attachment to something sinister or evil might happen. Many, many cultures feel that, that if you hear an owl, somebody's going to die or something bad's going to happen. And when you think about it, when somebody dies at night, likely the only thing that you're going to hear in terms of an animal sound is some mammal screeching or an owl.

• 36:08Speaker 01

  Because if a person dies in the daytime, there's all kinds of birds singing. And so there's not a particular focus. This is all speculation on my part, of course. But this is what I'm trying to distill this amazing literature. If you look at books on owls, there's almost always a culture chapter about all these different specific examples. So it's pretty amazing how different these things are. One example that hit home to me was, since I have done a lot of work in New Mexico on owls, on the Mexican spotted owl, I one time asked permission from the mascarero Apaches if I could catch owls on their land.

• 36:49Speaker 01

  And they looked at me like,

• 36:51Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 36:51Speaker 01

  You know, they just were silent. And I went, uh oh, something's going on. And they said, you can come on the land to do your wildlife work. Do not tell us what you found out.

• 37:04Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 37:04Speaker 01

  We don't want to know. We don't want to know there's owls there. We don't want to know anything.

• 37:09Alie Ward?

  Wow.

• 37:09Speaker 01

  And so I did. When I saw him after I left, I was quite successful. They said, how was your trip? And I said, very nice. I said, lots of deer, lots of bears, elk. I didn't mention an owl. It's out of respect for them because, you know, they, but on the other, just a couple of hundred miles away is the Zuni Pueblo. And the Zunis view owls as a source of wisdom and they're good omens. And of course, the Zuni are famous for their owl fetish carvings. So they make fetishes of all sorts of animals and each of the animals conveys a different sense of being to the Zuni.

• 37:53Speaker 01

  And the owls that they carve are just absolutely spectacular. So my study area was right, almost adjacent to the Zuni Reservation and the Zuni Pueblo. And I'd always go by there and, and visit them and made friends with one individual in particular.

• 38:10Alie Ward?

  Also, if you're like, excuse me, owl fetish, while there are frisonas that are technically like featheries, this is not the episode on sexual or creative expression. We don't kink shame anyway. But the original notion of a fetish means a religious or spiritual idol or object, like those carved so beautifully by the Zunis. And it wasn't until the 1800s that fetish was also known as like a fascination with an object or a person as an object. Again, that's a different episode. But while we're getting entomological, yes, Strigiformes and Strigiformology do share a root with strenga, which is Italian for witch, and it stems from the word for female evil spirit

• 38:51Alie Ward?

  or nocturnal creepiness, which came from stricks for owl. And here we are. So yeah, one word can mean a lot of things. Bird can also mean a lot of things. So patron Haley Kay, who asked, how did owls become both a symbol of knowledge and a harbinger of doom when they're just little goofy guys? And also patrons Talia Dunyak, Lori B, Keely Chavez, Barn Owl Tattooed JC asked about this. They wrote in to say that they are yelling at the top of their lungs with enthusiasm about owl episodes. So I hope that gives you some insight into that. Kelly Shaver also wrote in saying, I've been told never to post pictures of owls online without a content warning because of their place in some Native American cultures.

• 39:32Alie Ward?

  And on that note, there's a scene in the wonderful series Reservation Dogs where the main characters are visiting their weird Uncle Brownie, who has some fake animals in the front yard.

• 39:42Speaker 07

  Hey, Uncle. Aw, fuck. Hell, no, not an owl. Oh, my God. Yo, that's not a good sign. God damn. Yeah, no. You're gonna have a heart attack.

• 39:53Alie Ward?

  And in this scene, the owl's eyes are pixelated out, which is both cautionary, it's also hilarious. So, great show, highly recommend Reservation Dogs.

• 40:03Speaker 01

  And so, this is a long, roundabout answer, that there's been a long and complicated history with owls, and it's changes from time to time, but it can be good or evil. And the last example I would use of that from my own culture, Hispanic culture of New Mexico, is if your audience are interested in Hispanic literature, there's a wonderful book written by Rudolpho Anaya called Bless Me Ultima. There was even a movie made by it.

• 40:38Speaker 08

  I knew there would be something between us. Comes the controversial book that was banned, forbidden.

• 40:46Speaker 01

  And in that, there, the Ultima is a correndera, and her symbol was this owl. But the owl can also, in Hispanic culture, be... Something that is a bad omen. So it just depends on how the owl, what the context of the owl within the situation and who's wielding it and so forth. And so it's a complicated situation and something that's really interesting to read about. And if you get a chance, read some owl books and you'll see, you'll find great stories and really nice analyses of different examples from all over the world and through time.

• 41:26Alie Ward?

  So in a moment, we'll continue your questions, which cover everything from millennial fashion to the species and political wars of modern day owls. But first, let's donate to a cause of the ologist choosing. And for part one, Rocky chose International Owl Center. But for this part two, he chose North Coast Environmental Center, which was founded in 1971. They've been proudly providing quality environmental journalism for decades through their monthly publication of Eco News and their weekly Eco News Report radio show. And they have been an original litigant in lawsuits to save two Keystone species. They've allied with indigenous tribes to stop construction and the desecration of sacred indigenous high country. They've pioneered an international event, Coastal Cleanup Day, and a huge list of other achievements.

• 42:09Alie Ward?

  And you can find out more at yournec.org, which we'll link in the show notes. And that donation was made possible by sponsors of the show. How's your ponytail looking? Maybe like a little thinner than it used to? We've talked about this in our menopause episode. At some point, it's bound to happen to all of us. So if you're ready for thicker, fuller hair, start your free online visit today at forhers.com/ologies for personalized care. So that's F O R H E R S dot com slash ologies. Individual results may vary. Featured products include compounded drug products, which the FDA does not approve or verify for safety, effectiveness, or quality. Prescription required. Price varies based on product and subscription plan. See website for full details, restrictions, and important safety information. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace.

• 42:54Alie Ward?

  If you haven't heard me gushing about Squarespace for years, it's an all-in-one website platform. Whether you're trying to grow a business you have, or if you're just a baby business getting started, it has everything you need. That's where I secured my domain name. It helped me build a professional site. I can update it so easily. I've been using Squarespace since before Ologies existed. After procrastinating for years, I literally built my website in one evening. They have templates, they have flexible editing tools. Squarespace also makes it easy to share your work. You can book clients, you can get paid. They have built-in tools for scheduling and invoicing and email, all in one place. Whenever someone I know needs a website, whether they're a scientist that needs to put their work up, or someone who's just starting a business,

• 43:39Alie Ward?

  I'm like, dude, Squarespace. So head to squarespace.com/ologies for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code OLOGIES to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. You can do it.

• 43:54Alie Ward?

  Listen, sometimes you get out of your routine. That happened to me recently when I went out of town and I realized I forgot my Ritual Essential for Women 18+. It's a multi that I've been taking for years. And guess who landed in another country without them? Me. Didn't feel right. They contain nine key nutrients, two delayed-release capsules designed for optimal absorption. But Ritual, why do I love them so much? They have a team of scientists. They poured over thousands of studies to figure out what are common gaps that people need in their diet, but they don't actually consume. It's also designed to be gentle on the stomach. You can take it with or without food, which I love. Plus, I like that it looks like a tiny lava lamp. I tell you that every time, but it has these beads and oil, and it tastes like mint, easy down the hatch. I usually take them in the morning.

• 44:38Alie Ward?

  And the reason why I've stuck with Ritual for so many years is because my schedule's all over the place. Sometimes I'm eating breakfast. Sometimes I'm running through an airport with one shoe. So instead of striving for perfect health, aim for supporting foundational health. Save 25% on your first month at ritual.com/ologies. That's ritual.com/ologies for 25% off your first month.

• 45:01Speaker 09

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• 46:05Alie Ward?

  OK, let's get into a topic that is paramount in the global discussion of owls.

• 46:11Alie Ward?

  And, you know, anthropologically, I don't know if you know this, but the joyful Spitfire and ad zero monologist mentioned that owl pendants were very popular among millennial women in the era of 2011 to 2015. It was a fashion fad, and people are afraid that it will come back to haunt us. Because if you look at pictures of girls right after the 2010s, wow, there were a lot of owl pendants. Everyone was wearing them. So I'm going to have to go back and look from an anthropological lens why there were owl pendants everywhere.

• 46:46Alie Ward?

  Let me read you the opening graph of an April 2025 article on the website Mamma Mia, ominously titled "Millennials." The latest relic of your 2010 wardrobe is back. And it reads, there was a moment in the mid-naughties when absolutely everyone was wearing an owl necklace. It was the height of the boho trend. Celebrities were teeming empire-lined dresses with low-rise jeans and the accessory of choice was a big metal bird around your neck with beady black eyes and a tail that fluttered when you moved. And honestly, we've been through so much in 2025. I don't know if I can handle the resurgence of an owl necklace. It hasn't been long enough. It's too fresh. Also, we've already experienced it like a second COVID infection.

• 47:27Alie Ward?

  The owl necklaces first hatched in the 1970s as part of a respectable tidal wave of boho animal accessories. But in the 2010s, it was too much. I went down too many owl tunnels, but I did find a 2005 video of Lady Gaga wearing one as an unknown brunette singing cover songs to an apathetic crowd. And then there was a big hubbub a few years later when one of the Real Housewives started mass producing and selling them. There were knockoffs of knockoffs of knockoffs. There were lawsuits. There was no shortage of Forever 21 owl necklaces that would pair perfectly with jeans and a going-out top, and I'm not ready to go there again. Let's just move on. Let's heal from the first round. A couple more listener questions if I can.

• 48:12Alie Ward?

  You did some absolutely exceptional hooting,

• 48:19Alie Ward?

  which I knew that you were going to be good at hooting. And Valerie left a message.

• 48:24Speaker 12

  Hi, Ally. This is Valerie. I was camping last night and I heard not one but three barred owls above my tent talking away last night with a "who cooks for you?" and other sounds.

• 48:38Alie Ward?

  So Valerie wanted to know how owls are as parents, which we covered in part one. But on the topic of those barred owls, many of you had questions about barred owl versus spotted owl populations, such as Sarah Rosero, Kroll One, Oscar Chutain, Anne Horrible, Lisa Gorman, Marika, Melissa Mark, Sienna, Miranda Pana, Matt Thompson, Bonnie Anne Rutherford, Clayton Rutger, Danielle, and Fiona. And also Erin Ryan from Vancouver said. We have a long and torrid history of spotted owl management, and I think we're down to something like one or two individuals left in the wild. And I'm just wondering.

• 49:15Speaker 04

  How badly have we fucked up? And are they ever going to come back?

• 49:19Alie Ward?

  But I wanted to ask about barred owls and spotted owls. And if you could give us your take and your history, what's going on with barred owls and spotted owls?

• 49:31Speaker 01

  First of all, let me give you the, your audience, the hoots for these two owls. So that if they're ever out anywhere on the, in the West Coast states and you're camping, like your caller mentioned, they'll be able to recognize the difference. So the barred owl sounds like this.

• 49:53Speaker 01

  Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you all?

• 49:59Speaker 01

  Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you all? And the spotted owl is different. It's a series of four notes.

• 50:18Speaker 01

  And so these calls are distinguishable between those two species. The hypothesis is, and of course, it can never be proved, but that's sort of immaterial. That with the change of the settlement of the midwestern United States and the exclusion of fire, there's been the development of riparian forests along the streams, planting of woodlands, forests in what otherwise grassland. And the barred owls, which are native to the eastern United States, has moved westward over the past hundred or so years into Canada, northern Canada,

• 51:00Speaker 01

  Manitoba, British Columbia, and then south through Washington, Oregon, and California.

• 51:09Speaker 01

  But the barred owl is bigger and more aggressive and a dominant owl. And so they actually drive the spotted owl out of their territories and sometimes it will kill them. So over the past 30 years, we've seen a, well, there's been two declines of spotted owls. One related to the loss of old growth forest habitat and the other due to the invasion of the owl. We stabilized, I'm saying we, people in conservation has stabilized this through creation of forest reserves and restrictions on logging of old forest and then guidance to private landowners

• 51:50Speaker 01

  to maintain certain characteristics of forest so that the owls that they have will be maintained there.

• 51:56Alie Ward?

  And we go into more detail on forestry management with Dr. Gavin Jones in the fire ecology episode and with Dr. Amy Christensen in her indigenous fire ecology episode on what she calls good fire. But this spotted owl species, as we mentioned in part one, is this hugely political issue that was essentially conservationists versus loggers, like tree huggers versus capitalists, animal people versus industry. It came down to this really bifurcated political debate. And the spotted owl became this canary in a coal mine kind of species that helped curb an unsustainable timber industry to preserve a lot of these forests and a lot of the ecology. So that's the good news at least.

• 52:38Speaker 01

  That's sort of been stabilized. But now that this barred owl is invading the range of the spotted owl and displacing them and killing them, and they incurred at much higher densities, it's almost inevitable that they're going to cause them to go extinct. And the only way that we have determined, and I say we, this is scientists in general, have determined that this is going to be stopped is to remove the barred owls. And that has caused a great deal of backlash from animal welfare groups. Because let's face it, I mean, most people in the United States love owls, including all the people that are

• 53:19Speaker 01

  scientists and conservationists that are in favor of removing barred owl. Nobody wants to kill a barred owl, but. If you are going to maintain spotted owls, you're going to have to remove barred owls. And it's much more than just the barred owl. This large owl has four times the density that spotted owls do. So they're eating a lot more small mammal prey. And their their diet is very different from the spotted owl. You can consider the spotted owl a specialist in that their primary prey are flying squirrels and wood rats. And they take red tree voles and some mice and the like.

• 54:03Speaker 01

  But those two prey make up 80% of their diet. Whereas the barred owl, they eat everything. They eat all those, plus they eat salamanders. They'll even take fish and insects and birds and you name it. They eat just about everything. And in fact, we think that they're eating so many things. And because they're at such high density, that they're going to have serious negative effects on many other species as well.

• 54:31Alie Ward?

  Hmm.

• 54:31Speaker 01

  An unpublished study that was just recently completed has shown that there's at least 30 species that conservationists consider species of special conservation concern that are being eaten by barred owls.

• 54:45Alie Ward?

  Oh, that's a lot.

• 54:46Speaker 01

  And we already have direct evidence of extinction of screech owls on an island in Puget Sound. Around my house, I have not heard a screech owl or a pygmy owl for 10 years. And I've got three pairs of barred owls.

• 55:03Alie Ward?

  Hmm.

• 55:04Speaker 01

  So it goes on and on that there's this cascade effect that this has caused. And we've shown through research, again, we in the general sense, we've shown through research that it is easy to remove barred owls from certain places, more difficult other places, but it can be done. And it's cost effective to do it as well. Yet, because there are owls and because killing is involved, there's been a backlash. It's almost analogous to what we see with politics in today's world. Its euphemistic form is the bullshit asymmetry principle,

• 55:47Speaker 01

  which means that the amount of effort it takes to counterveil misleading our lies is much greater than telling a lie or putting out the misleading information. And so we've had that with the barred owl in which certain groups have continued to say the same thing, that it's impossible to do this. It is, you know, a massive slaughter and it will be a large number of owls that'll be taken. But once you get the situation under a reasonable control, it's a sort of a maintenance situation that will occur.

• 56:25Alie Ward?

  And a 2024 New York Times article bearing the headline, "They Shoot Owls in California, Don't They?" explains that northern spotted owl populations have declined by up to 80% over the past two decades. It reads, "In the wilds of British Columbia, the northern spotted owl has vanished. Only one, a female, remains. If the trend continues," it says, "the northern spotted owl could become the first owl subspecies in the United States to go extinct." And it goes on to describe that in response to conservationist plans to cull the barred owl while rebuilding more spotted owl habitat, 75 animal organizations signed a letter urging the federal agency to drop the plan to cull the barred owls. Now, Rocky, interviewed in the New York Times article,

• 57:08Alie Ward?

  said, "It's apparent to me that the 75 authors of that letter either did not understand the plan or they didn't read it carefully." If people complain about the cost and feasibility of 15,000 birds removed per year, the price tag for translocation would probably send them into cardiac arrest. And Rocky continued to say, "Besides being too time consuming, where would you relocate the owls to? No one wants them. You can let nature take its course," he added, "but that course..." Would be extinction for the spotted owl. Now, one of Rocky's colleagues, Eric Forsman, was quoted as saying, "Is there some point at which we simply admit that we have screwed things up so badly that there's no going back to the good old days?" Eric said, "I'm torn apart by this dilemma,

• 57:51Alie Ward?

  and I find it difficult to get mad at anyone on either side of the argument." And Rocky wrote to me and noted that this article really seemed to have an agenda. It was biased against the science of conservation. And the New York Times also did not include his counterpoint, which is, "Is conservation not a never-ending process?" And in 2019, Rocky addressed a raptor convention on the topic of this dilemma. And his address was titled, "When a Conservation Conflict Comes Full Circle: The Spotted Owl Conflict Is A Wicked Problem", which we'll link in our website. It's a tough topic, and it's a huge problem to try to undo what humans have done to the planet for the last several hundred years.

• 58:30Speaker 01

  But yet, the person keeps saying that it's going to cost a billion dollars when that's not true at all. It's a lie. But you cannot fight this continual amount of information. So the public in general, I think, has been misled. The LA Times, for example, came out with an editorial against this control. Whereas most mainstream conservation groups, like the American Bird Conservancy, many of the Audubon groups, and Center for Biological Diversity are in favor of that control because of not just the effect on the barred owl, but the effect on all the other owls,

• 59:12Speaker 01

  plus all these other species that are being killed by the barred owl. So it's really, you know, as I published a paper one time, it's a wicked problem. This and the fire issue that Gavin Jones talked to you about before with owls. So that is it in a nutshell. It's just sort of a long story. But it is clear what we think the answer is. It's a matter of whether people are willing to accept this. But the consequence of not accepting it is that you have to be willing to lose all your, many of your small owls, many of the other endangered species and the spotted owl.

• 59:52Alie Ward?

  So what do we do?

• 59:53Speaker 01

  And to me, I think the choice is clear because you have, the barred owl is very widespread all over eastern North America. And it's an invader in a sense here. Whether that's natural, as they try to claim, or unnatural owing to the effects of humans. To me, that's immaterial. It is a choice that we're going to make. And the thing of it is that we make these choices as humans all the time. We control rodents and rats and things that we don't like, species that affect crops. And people say, well, you're playing God. Well, no, we're playing human, really. You know, we're looking after our own self-interest.

• 1:00:38Speaker 01

  And if our self-interest is in maintaining biodiversity and the species that we've come to know and love, then the choice is clear to me.

• 1:00:48Alie Ward?

  I was thinking about that today because I have an ant bait in my shower right now. And I was telling my husband, I was like, I'm going to go take a shower with 4,000 of my closest friends. And, you know, there are an invasive species, this particular kind of ant down here displacing harvesters. And I don't have an issue with putting an ant bait down. And a lot of people probably have rodent bait in their backyard without even thinking about it. And it's interesting that when the species becomes very charismatic, then that's when people start to speak up. But, you know, life for life and how many downstream effects aren't considered in that management. But, I mean, so many people who know wildlife.

• 1:01:31Alie Ward?

  Scientists know that they're conservationists and that they're maintaining balance to counter effect what humans have imbalanced is part of wildlife conservation and that you have to accept what humans have done and try to counteract it. You mentioned also rodenticides and last listener question in general is sort of like, what can we do to help owls? A lot of people wanted to know. Me, like Emily Nutzum, Erin Farley, It's Hutchins, Callie, Tiger Yudi, Stratford, Abbott, Iris, wanted to know about rat poisons. And Emily says, big up vote for discussing rat poisons. What can we do to help owls in general? And can we start with not putting out rat poisons?

• 1:02:13Speaker 01

  Absolutely. So the issue of rat poison is a big one. And rat poison has been used for a long time around people's houses and they've used it in agriculture and rodent poisoning, not just rat poison, but rodent poisoning because of damage to crops. And one of the things about that is that these small mammals that are the target organisms, they eat that and they accumulate it in them and then they die. And then other species eat them and then they get the rat poison. And so there's a secondary poisoning effect.

• 1:02:50Speaker 01

  And now that we have marijuana growing virtually everywhere in California, that it is a huge, huge problem for wildlife. Studies have been done, for example, as a result of removing these barred owls, scientists have actually looked at the secondary poisoning in the barred owls that are collected or removed, shot and removed from these spotted owl territories. And they show something like over 80% secondary poisoning. So it's getting into everything. I mean, all these raptors that are picking them, anything that's gonna eat a carrion is gonna pick them up. And I've seen pictures of bears

• 1:03:35Speaker 01

  with their faces covered with these really toxic anticoagulant poisons that they've, the bears raided some pot farmers' illegal camp and gotten this stuff all over their face, and they're gonna die. I mean, it's only a matter of time before they're gonna die. So it's a very serious problem. And what I would recommend is people do not use rat poison. They either trap the rats, or make every effort to try to exclude the rats from where they are, eliminate their food that they're coming around to try to get, close up your house as best you can, and so forth. So just avoid rat poison. That's the big thing, because it's a serious problem.

• 1:04:18Alie Ward?

  I was like, why weed farms? And I looked into it, and yeah, they like the seeds, and the stems and the seedlings. But no, I know what you're thinking, because I was thinking it too. And researchers say that the rats are not binge-watching Beavis and Butthead on YouTube, or microwaving a bunch of taquitos. They're not getting stoned. You gotta have heat on that THC, experts say. But yes, if they are eating your crops or your drugs, don't poison them, for the owl's sake.

• 1:04:43Speaker 01

  Other things that you can do is, of course, nest boxes. Owls will use the nest boxes. Try to be helpful in terms of the way you have your, if you're lucky enough to have a yard, and you have ornamental plants, you know, grow plants that have food sources so that, you know, squirrels or other things that'll eat those fruits, and then that'll attract other birds, plus raptors and owls. So, you know, try to do what you can to make your little part of nature to help owls.

• 1:05:17Alie Ward?

  What about, can you make friends with an owl? If I see an owl and it's hooting, say, my great horned friends, if I say to it, "Hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo," do they say, "Who are you? Get out of here," or do they say, "What's up, buddy?" Can you hoo back at an owl?

• 1:05:33Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, you can. I don't encourage that.

• 1:05:38Alie Ward?

  Okay, good.

• 1:05:38Speaker 01

  The main thing is that the owls, you have to remember why the owls are hooting. They're hooting to make contact with their mate. They're hooting to defend their territory. Oftentimes... If they're defending the territory and they're on the nest and you hoot to them and you agitate that male that's defending the territory, you very well might call the female off the nest to join the male in the defense of the territory. And then the young are exposed to predation in the nest or to the weather. And so it's important that you really don't do that. I mean, birders are notoriously bad for wanting to do this.

• 1:06:22Speaker 01

  And I mean, I understand it because everybody wants to see owls. But you have to be very, very judicious about calling owls and try to do it not in the primary part of the nesting season, but in the non-nesting season or right at the edges when you know the young are out of the nest and are able to take care of themselves. And in fact, when I travel places and I've seen an owl of a particular species, I don't call it, even though I'd really love to see it. I just don't do it.

• 1:06:56Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 1:06:56Speaker 01

  Because I know that other birders are around there trying to see those owls as well. And I just figure it's my tiny contribution to, you know, reducing harassment of these birds.

• 1:07:10Alie Ward?

  Oh, that's good to know. So when I hear and see my local owls, I can maybe say under my breath, hello owl, I like you, and that's plenty.

• 1:07:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, they could probably hear that. Yeah, I mean, trust me, they have incredible hearing. It's a hundred times better than us, you know. And as an example, in Southern California, my sister Angela lives in a little town called Highlands out on the face of the San Bernardino's. And we were sitting in her, she lives on the edge of this orroa, and I saw a barn owl at dusk land about 150, 200 meters away from us, which is a fair distance. And she says, oh, did you see that owl? And I said, yeah. I said, you want to see it closer? And she said, oh, come on, you can't bring it closer. And I watched this and I went.

• 1:08:07Speaker 01

  I made the sound of a mouse and that thing came right to my head. That's the old hat trick, right? It came right over the top of my head and I ducked and it landed right behind me. And then that bird heard me from 150, 200 yards away. So even that little tiny, they may hear you, so.

• 1:08:32Alie Ward?

  Oh my gosh, I'll keep my mouth shut.

• 1:08:34Alie Ward?

  And Rocky later sent me a sweet, wonderful note apologizing for being harsh about it, which he was not in any way. But he also said that the American Birding Association has a code of conduct, which we'll link in our site, about when it is okay to vocalize toward an owl. And so now, when I hear owls hooting, especially those lovely nights when a pair is hooting at each other to reinforce their bond, which is like exactly what's happening when you're talking to someone and you can't stop texting back and forth, I will stay out of it. That's not my place. So that's so good to know. Thank you, Rocky, for helping me not freak out the people I love, who are sometimes owls.

• 1:09:11Alie Ward?

  I always ask your least favorite and your favorite thing about what you do. What is the hardest part about studying owls? Is it the conservation part? Is it staying up too late?

• 1:09:21Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, for me, it has really been the conservation conflict aspect of it. Because almost invariably, most spotted owl experts get involved to a degree with conservation conflicts or the owl conflict. But I've taken it to a different level in the sense that I got really interested in this mainly because I have a very good colleague and friend from the University of Aberdeen, Stephen Redpath, who came out to visit me as a postdoc. And I took him around to our study area and we got to be really good friends. And we started collaborating on conservation conflicts, thinking about the general theory

• 1:10:05Speaker 01

  of it and why people make the decisions they do and how do you resolve conflicts? And what are the key issues involved here? When I get involved and I just see how intractable it is and it's very discouraging. But it's almost like a microcosm of our politics today. Or you see this constant barrage of misinformation and outright lies. And again, you know, the bullshit asymmetry principle comes in there.

• 1:10:35Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:36Speaker 01

  And it's very difficult to deal with that. You can defeat them in the scientific arena, but it doesn't make any difference if they're winning in the public arena. They're experts at this. They're experts at, at social media. They're experts at communicating with people and, and reaching politicians. And scientists aren't trained to do that. And I think that's the greatest frustration that, that there is to me.

• 1:11:02Alie Ward?

  So yes, when people use scientific sounding language to mislead the public about what the experts are actually saying, that really gets this goat understandably. Clearly Rocky and his owl expert colleagues have dedicated their lives to the survival of threatened species.

• 1:11:19Alie Ward?

  What about your favorite part about studying owls or a favorite owl? Or a moment in your owl history that sticks out for you?

• 1:11:29Speaker 01

  Well, my favorite owl, of course, is, is the spotted owl because of, you know, I've gotten to know it so well. And, but the, this owl I wanted to see most in the world was the long whiskered owl. It's a little tiny owl, probably the second smallest owl in the world. It's a weird little guy and lives in Elfin Forest in the Andes of Peru. They're about the size of your hand. You put up your hand, little teeny things. But really the most satisfying thing to me and what has made this probably the most wonderful part of the journey is the students that I've worked with, you know, seeing how they have thought of a problem, solved it,

• 1:12:12Speaker 01

  gone out there, done the hard work, created something wonderful and gone on and had a fantastic career. And I just, I just, I felt that that was the penultimate reward for all of the work on the owls.

• 1:12:29Alie Ward?

  Oh, that's so sweet to hear. And people who talk about you. Behind your back, people say the sweetest things about you and that you're just such an icon and a mentor. People gush about you behind your back. So whether or not you're good at taking compliments, just know that you're very beloved in the bird community and especially the owl community. But Rocky, this is even better than I imagined. I have been begging you to come on this show for weeks and weeks and weeks. It was even better than imagined.

• 1:13:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I appreciate that. I was looking forward to it myself.

• 1:13:08Alie Ward?

  Thank you for making my dream come true and letting me talk to you about owls for a couple hours.

• 1:13:13Speaker 01

  Oh, that's fine. I can, I can talk about all the owls all the time.

• 1:13:17Alie Ward?

  All day and I guess all night, too.

• 1:13:20Speaker 01

  Brilliant.

• 1:13:23Alie Ward?

  So once again, ask visionary people some blurry questions. And thank you so much again to RJ Rocky Gutierrez for being on not just this week, but last week as well. We have links in the show notes to find out more about Rocky. And of course, we post more research on our website at alieward.com/ologies/strogiformology. And after part one aired, Rocky mentioned his wonderful wife in a note writing to me, I also found out KT is almost as shy as me. She was embarrassed that I praised her talent, but I told her she should never be embarrassed because I am not shy about expressing my love for her. So she settled down after that. I never get tired of praising her talents, of which there are many.

• 1:14:02Alie Ward?

  Oh, Rocky, KT, how lucky we are to have you two out here on our little planet helping out the owls, too. So we are at Ologies on Instagram and Blue Sky. I'm at Ali Ward on both. Smologies are shorter, kid-friendly episodes, available wherever you find podcasts. Just search S-M-O-L-O-G-I-E-S. Ologies merch has totes and hats and shirts. Thank you to patrons at patreon.com/ologies for supporting the show. They also get first dibs on tickets for live shows, which is another perk for a dollar a month. Thank you to Erin Talbert, who admins Theology's podcast Facebook group. Aveline Malik makes our professional transcripts. Kelly R. Dwyer does the website. Once again, nocturnal and diurnal scheduling producer is Noelle Dilworth. Our eagle-eyed managing director is Susan Hale. And the pair of editors, sharing the branch, is Jake Chaffee.

• 1:14:46Alie Ward?

  And lead editor Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio, Nick Thorburn, hooted out the theme music. And if you stick around until the very end, you know, I may tell you a secret. And this week, it's that, yes, according to listeners, I can ruin my life by tugging my dongle out of a port before ejecting the SD card. So thank you for scaring me straight. I shall never again. Also, another secret, absolutely bonkers, is that I was working on this episode on a plane from Atlanta to Hartford, Connecticut, last night to go give a talk at Smith College, which I'm about to do in an hour or two. And the pilot casually said, and if you look out your window on the left side of the plane, you'll see, and I was sure he was going to name like some bullshit stadium I didn't care about. It was like 10:00 PM. I had more writing to do. And he was like, you'll see the northern lights.

• 1:15:31Alie Ward?

  And I took a glance. The horizon was fuchsia and red and green. And my face was pressed to the window. And I tapped the dude next to me and he said, oh yeah, I was stationed in Alaska for years. You should hear them crackle when they move. What? I saw the northern lights out of plane window last night. I was like, well, that's a little treat, isn't it? And for more on the northern lights and solar storms, you can see the heliology episode from April 2024, as well as the eclipse field trip episode. Anyway, there I am. I'm folded up in an airplane seat. I got mustard on my jacket, just crossing off a bucket list item from the actual sky. So I'm not mad at that. Also, the solar storm may be visible through November 14th, just in case you're in a region that can see it.

• 1:16:16Alie Ward?

  Okay. Good luck. Farewell. Bye bye.

• 1:16:38Speaker 07

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