Nigel and the Real Gannet

A love story about a rogue bird and his concrete lover.

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

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:38Speaker 01

  Wait, you're listening.

• 0:40Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 0:41Speaker 01

  All right.

• 0:42Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 0:43Speaker 01

  All right.

• 0:45Speaker 03

  You're listening to Radiolab.

• 0:48Speaker 01

  Radiolab.

• 0:48Speaker 03

  From...

• 0:49Speaker 01

  WNYC.

• 0:51Speaker 02

  See?

• 0:56Latif Nasser?

  Hey, this is Radiolab. I'm Latif Nasr. And today, we have a small story about a small life that touched people all over the world.

• 1:06Speaker 02

  Okay, one, two, three.

• 1:08Latif Nasser?

  And that doesn't end the way you want it to.

• 1:11Speaker 02

  Oh, there's a delay. Good enough, good enough. You'll be fine.

• 1:14Latif Nasser?

  Comes to us from producer Annie McEwen.

• 1:17Speaker 05

  Hi, Annie.

• 1:17Latif Nasser?

  And it starts with a total loner.

• 1:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:20Speaker 02

  I'm okay. Let's picture you. I imagine that you're tall and you stride around the island in, like, hiking boots.

• 1:30Speaker 05

  Like, ah, gosh, yes, tall. I'm so tall, I've got quite bad posture and sort of loom around.

• 1:35Speaker 02

  Oh, so you're hunching around the island?

• 1:37Speaker 05

  Hunching and stalking, yes. Scowling, but under a sun hat, because the sun's pretty strong in New Zealand.

• 1:44Speaker 02

  This is Chris Bell. And back about a decade ago, he was the sole inhabitant of an island off the west coast of New Zealand called Mana Island.

• 1:54Speaker 05

  Ah, gosh. It's like the perfect size of Ireland. It's not too big and not too small.

• 1:59Speaker 02

  Nose to tail, it takes about an hour and a half to walk across.

• 2:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, looking down.

• 2:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, of course. It's got cliffs, a high grassy plateau, shrubs and woodland. And Chris lived there in an old farmhouse.

• 2:10Speaker 05

  Yeah, wood stove and...

• 2:11Speaker 02

  Did you make your own food all the time?

• 2:13Speaker 05

  Well, there was no one else to make it for me, so yeah.

• 2:16Speaker 02

  Although he did share the house with...

• 2:17Speaker 05

  Handfuls of geckos.

• 2:18Speaker 02

  A whole bunch of geckos.

• 2:20Speaker 05

  As soon as evening came, you would hear them rattling about in the roof space.

• 2:23Speaker 02

  And sometimes he'd get human visitors, but...

• 2:25Speaker 05

  Very common to go 10 days without seeing or hearing anybody else.

• 2:29Speaker 02

  Often, he'd be totally alone.

• 2:31Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:33Latif Nasser?

  Okay. And what is... How did he... Why is he... Is he spurning civilization? What is he doing there?

• 2:40Speaker 05

  Um...

• 2:40Speaker 02

  Well, this island was sort of in a state of recovery.

• 2:43Speaker 05

  Gosh, it was farmed for many years.

• 2:45Speaker 02

  For 100-plus years, it had been used as farmland.

• 2:48Speaker 05

  I think it was sheep and cattle. And, well, in all this time, the wildlife took a big hit.

• 2:53Speaker 02

  The sheep and the cows ate all the grass and trees.

• 2:56Speaker 05

  And invasive species arrived, particularly mice.

• 2:58Speaker 02

  And the mice ate the eggs of the birds and lizards that lived on the island and reduced this ecosystem to basically a wasteland.

• 3:06Latif Nasser?

  Eesh.

• 3:07Speaker 02

  But then, in the 1980s, the Department of Conservation of New Zealand stepped in and got rid of all the mice and all the sheep.

• 3:13Speaker 05

  And once the mice were gone and planting restoration began...

• 3:16Speaker 02

  They thought, let's use this island as like a safe haven for fragile species who need a bit of like tender, loving care and place to sort of find their feet again. So the island was home to things like...

• 3:27Speaker 05

  McGregor's skink and gold-stripped gecko and the Cook Strait Giant Weta.

• 3:31Latif Nasser?

  The wetter?

• 3:32Speaker 05

  Which is a giant lumbering grasshopper.

• 3:35Latif Nasser?

  Oh, my god.

• 3:36Speaker 02

  There are kiwi birds, little blue penguins called cororas.

• 3:39Latif Nasser?

  So cute.

• 3:40Speaker 02

  This endangered bird called the takahay.

• 3:42Speaker 05

  Which is like a giant blue chicken. I mean, it absolutely shouldn't exist and almost didn't.

• 3:46Speaker 02

  And to protect all this fragility, the Department of Conservation installed a single human inhabitant, a ranger. And for a time, that ranger was Chris.

• 3:58Speaker 05

  14th of November 2016. That evening was calm and mild.

• 4:02Speaker 02

  His journal from the island is filled with...

• 4:04Speaker 05

  Two diving petrol burrows to check.

• 4:06Speaker 02

  Counting seabirds and...

• 4:07Speaker 05

  Cutting grass for the better part of the day.

• 4:09Speaker 02

  Clearing meadows.

• 4:10Speaker 05

  Checking wax tags that monitor for invasive rodents.

• 4:13Speaker 02

  Keeping the island pest-free and just generally...

• 4:15Speaker 05

  Clearing weeds, digging culverts, tending the nursery, building and dismantling.

• 4:19Speaker 02

  Doing what needed doing.

• 4:20Speaker 05

  On a fine day, I took a backpack sprayer up to the gannet colony.

• 4:24Speaker 02

  His work took him all over the island, sometimes as far as one of the more unusual conservation projects.

• 4:29Speaker 05

  A little off the main track.

• 4:31Speaker 02

  The gannet colony. Do you know what a gannet is?

• 4:34Latif Nasser?

  A gannet? A seabird?

• 4:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, yes, but not just any seabird. Gannets are seabird royalty. They're snowy white with black wingtips and yellow heads.

• 4:45Speaker 05

  I mean, they're beautiful flyers. They're a big bird, they're very elegant. They glide along.

• 4:49Speaker 02

  And when hunting for fish...

• 4:50Speaker 05

  They tuck their wings in and their necks stretched out, their bill down.

• 4:54Speaker 02

  They dive like fighter jets.

• 4:55Speaker 05

  Into the water in a big splash. I mean, one of the most spectacular sights you can see.

• 5:00Speaker 02

  And sounds you can hear, like these birds are loud.

• 5:03Speaker 05

  Oh, it's incredibly noisy. It's...

• 5:06Speaker 02

  Can you mimic that sound?

• 5:08Speaker 05

  Absolutely not. Not in a million years.

• 5:11Speaker 02

  Please?

• 5:12Speaker 05

  No, no. I couldn't. Like, no.

• 5:15Speaker 02

  Ah. They sound like this. And on a regular basis, Chris would busy himself with...

• 5:22Speaker 05

  Weeding the colony.

• 5:23Speaker 02

  And scrubbing the gannets.

• 5:24Speaker 05

  To remove the lichen blooms that have colonized them.

• 5:27Speaker 02

  Because they'd get covered in moss.

• 5:28Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm. You know, it's not such a convincing or alluring feature of a bird if they've got moss growing on their heads.

• 5:35Latif Nasser?

  Wait, what? They have moss on their heads?

• 5:37Speaker 02

  They do, because these gannets are fake.

• 5:41Latif Nasser?

  The gannets are fake?

• 5:42Speaker 05

  A bunch of concrete gannets.

• 5:44Speaker 02

  Painted white with yellow heads, black wingtips.

• 5:47Speaker 05

  Placed around in kind of naturalistic positions.

• 5:50Speaker 02

  And this sound is a recording playing over speakers.

• 5:55Latif Nasser?

  And like, why did they make a bunch of fake gannets?

• 5:59Speaker 02

  Well, the Department of Conservation put them there, like, in the mid-'90s, like years and years before Chris showed up, to try to lure gannets to the island with the hopes of establishing a new gannet colony.

• 6:10Speaker 05

  Where gannets can increase their numbers and grow and have another safe haven in a very unpredictable and changing world.

• 6:18Speaker 02

  The only problem is, gannets prefer to nest where other gannets are already nesting. So how do you get gannets to come to a place that has no gannets? Well, one way is to make some, and then you wait. And wait, and wait, and wait. The months, the years ticked by, the fake gannets would fade, volunteers would repaint them, paint the rocks around them white to look like poop, reposition the speakers, but still...

• 6:49Speaker 05

  For, I guess, nearly 20 years.

• 6:51Speaker 02

  This project was a failure.

• 6:53Speaker 05

  Totally unsuccessful.

• 6:57Speaker 02

  No gannets.

• 6:58Speaker 05

  No, no.

• 7:04Speaker 02

  But then, one day, a beautiful snowy white male gannet with golden head and black-tipped wings flew in, hovered over the decoys, and he landed, checked the place out.

• 7:17Speaker 05

  Decided that the colony was a good place.

• 7:19Speaker 02

  And then he moved in.

• 7:20Latif Nasser?

  Oh.

• 7:21Speaker 05

  Ah.

• 7:22Speaker 02

  This was huge.

• 7:23Speaker 05

  Absolutely huge, because he's a lot more convincing than the concrete replicas.

• 7:29Speaker 02

  This bird was momentum.

• 7:31Latif Nasser?

  This is the pioneer. This is the Johnny Appleseed of gannets.

• 7:34Speaker 02

  Exactly. He was now going to be the lure for other gannets to come. And he was given the name Nigel.

• 7:44Speaker 02

  Nigel, no mates.

• 7:46Latif Nasser?

  Oh.

• 7:47Speaker 02

  Because soon, it became apparent that this bird...

• 7:50Speaker 05

  Oh, gosh.

• 7:51Speaker 02

  ...was maybe a little different.

• 7:55Speaker 05

  I mean, it somehow...

• 7:57Speaker 02

  It seemed as though Nigel was taking a shine to one particular decoy. Was she in any way different than the others? Was she... Like, was there something about her that was...

• 8:08Speaker 05

  No, no, not to me, not to me.

• 8:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:12Speaker 05

  No.

• 8:13Speaker 02

  Huh. She was one of the sitting gannets, wings tucked by her sides, head raised, painted eyes gazing out over the ocean. I'm just wondering why he chose her.

• 8:25Speaker 05

  My gosh. Yeah, that's a mystery for the ages.

• 8:32Speaker 02

  Gannets are sort of famous for their bonding rituals.

• 8:35Speaker 05

  Courtship is really important.

• 8:36Speaker 02

  They'll do these almost dances.

• 8:38Speaker 05

  Calling to one another, stretching their necks out high, opening their wings.

• 8:42Speaker 02

  Raising their beaks up slowly towards the sky before quickly clacking them together.

• 8:46Speaker 05

  All part of just reaffirming the bond and being a partnership.

• 8:50Speaker 02

  And Nigel began to do a sort of one-sided version of this with the decoy.

• 8:57Speaker 05

  He would do the whole big display thing of, you know, of putting up his wings and...

• 9:02Speaker 02

  Gently resting his head on top of her head.

• 9:04Speaker 05

  And doing a nice big call.

• 9:06Speaker 02

  He even built her a nest.

• 9:07Speaker 05

  Just a low platform of sticks and mud and tufts of grass.

• 9:12Speaker 02

  And when he wasn't at sea, that's where he would be, by her side. Because the thing is, gannets are socially monogamous.

• 9:20Latif Nasser?

  Oh.

• 9:21Speaker 02

  And often mate for life.

• 9:24Latif Nasser?

  Oh.

• 9:25Speaker 02

  As time passed...

• 9:29Speaker 05

  Gannet finds love with concrete statues. The local paper in Wellington, you ran stories from time to time on him.

• 9:35Speaker 06

  He's a lovely bird, but he's a bit confused.

• 9:37Speaker 02

  More and more people began to hear about Nigel and his choice of mate and...

• 9:41Speaker 05

  It touched some sort of nerve with people.

• 9:44Speaker 06

  He's really taken with it.

• 9:45Speaker 05

  This idea of a lonely bird. He's obviously quite desperate. Finding a mate who doesn't really exist. Tempting to impress what he appears to believe is a real female bird. And the sadness and the tragic comedy of that situation.

• 10:00Speaker 02

  And Nigel had been living there alone for almost a year.

• 10:02Speaker 07

  Eighteenth of August, 2016. The morning was graciously without a breath of wind.

• 10:06Speaker 02

  By the time that Chris showed up.

• 10:07Speaker 07

  Nigel was in his usual spot.

• 10:09Speaker 02

  To find that he shared the island with this strange.

• 10:12Speaker 05

  I, I.

• 10:13Speaker 02

  Neighbor.

• 10:14Speaker 05

  Sort of tempted to spin a tale of seeing him as competition and us just dividing the island between us and, you know, this island's only big enough for one misanthropic loner, Nigel. You stick to your side of the island and I'll have mine.

• 10:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's funny because like I'm trying hard not to anthropomorphize him, but if I just indulge for a second and imagine from Nigel's perspective, watching this bizarre, like tall man slouching around the island just alone. And he's like, I'm so worried about that Chris guy. He just seems so lonely.

• 10:49Speaker 02

  He doesn't seem to miss human company. Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's right. But what Chris was really thinking about when it came to Nigel was, what can I do?

• 10:57Speaker 05

  As wonderful as it is to have one gannet, you don't want just one gannet. You want, you want a bunch.

• 11:04Speaker 02

  And one bird, no matter how hard it tries, cannot make more birds with a statue.

• 11:08Speaker 05

  Um, so, so yeah, that, that is the, the difficulty.

• 11:13Speaker 02

  And so he would occasionally head over to the colony, clean the decoys, make sure the speakers were working, watch Nigel, watch the empty skies above him. And that's how things were.

• 11:28Speaker 02

  Until.

• 11:29Speaker 07

  Twenty fifth of December.

• 11:30Speaker 02

  A Christmas miracle.

• 11:31Speaker 05

  Just before Christmas. It would just be before Christmas. Yeah.

• 11:34Speaker 02

  Tell me.

• 11:34Speaker 05

  Oh, it was absolutely amazing.

• 11:36Speaker 02

  Okay. I'm going to imagine you're walking, you're doing a daily walk. You walk towards the gannet colony and you hear sounds. Is this any, you have no idea. You don't remember.

• 11:49Speaker 05

  Yeah, I remember, I remember being greatly elated.

• 11:53Speaker 07

  The great surprise came yesterday on my visit to the gannet colony when I saw no less than four actual gannets in place.

• 12:00Latif Nasser?

  Oh my God.

• 12:01Speaker 02

  Three more real life gannets had finally come.

• 12:04Latif Nasser?

  On Christmas?

• 12:05Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 12:05Speaker 07

  This is unprecedented. And coming only 10 days after our repositioning the speaker system, it fills me with pride.

• 12:12Speaker 05

  This group were just doing exactly what Nigel had done several years before. They'd been lured in, they'd landed, they were interested, displaying to each other, they were checking out the replicas.

• 12:22Speaker 02

  And.

• 12:22Speaker 07

  Fifth of January, 2018. Again, I saw four gannets at the colony.

• 12:27Speaker 02

  They seemed to sort of settle in.

• 12:28Speaker 05

  Gosh.

• 12:29Speaker 02

  Finally, Nigel, the live bird, was a powerful enough lure to bring in these other live birds. Like he did his job.

• 12:37Latif Nasser?

  Yeah.

• 12:38Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 12:42Speaker 02

  At least that's how everyone thought this was going to go.

• 12:47Latif Nasser?

  What actually happened after the break?

• 12:51Speaker 02

  After the break, you mother flippers. You can say that.

• 12:53Latif Nasser?

  Oh, I love that. What actually happened after the break, you mother flippers?

• 13:00Speaker 02

  That's good. That's really good.

• 13:02Latif Nasser?

  I like it.

• 13:05Speaker 02

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• 14:23Latif Nasser?

  This is our glass. On This American Life, one that we like is a good mystery. Sometimes about really big things, things you hear in the news, but most times the little mysteries are the best.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  Our lost and found is currently filled with pants. I don't know. I, I've never seen this happen. I've got skirts. I've got shorts.

• 14:42Speaker 03

  Wait, is this true?

• 14:43Speaker 01

  This is true.

• 14:44Latif Nasser?

  Mysteries of every size. Each week, This American Life, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 14:55Latif Nasser?

  Lutif, Radiolab, back from break with Annie and Chris and Nigel.

• 15:01Speaker 02

  Yeah. So Nigel, the gannet, lived alone with his concrete decoy lover for a couple of years. And then finally, three more live gannets come. And now Nigel can be with his own kind.

• 15:13Latif Nasser?

  And now he can have real friends.

• 15:15Speaker 02

  Now he can have real friends.

• 15:16Latif Nasser?

  Maybe a real mate. Yeah.

• 15:19Speaker 02

  Except.

• 15:21Speaker 05

  No.

• 15:22Speaker 02

  No.

• 15:26Speaker 06

  Love concretes all, one love bird's tail.

• 15:29Speaker 02

  The local paper published a picture of the colony at this time. And you can see in the foreground, there are the three new live gannets mingling among the decoys. And in the background, way, way on the other side of the colony, there's Nigel. And this was apparently the common arrangement because these new gannets.

• 15:51Speaker 05

  They really, really didn't go anywhere near Nigel and he had no interest whatsoever in them. This, this group of gannets and Nigel completely ignored one another.

• 16:03Speaker 02

  Huh. Now the newspaper's headline read.

• 16:06Speaker 05

  Gannet with a heart of stone. He's got live company, but he prefers a concrete decoy.

• 16:14Speaker 02

  People were sort of amused, a little disappointed maybe, but.

• 16:19Speaker 05

  You know, bird courtship is intricate.

• 16:21Speaker 02

  Chris knew that these were early days.

• 16:23Speaker 05

  Just because, you know, these other birds turned up, it's not going to be immediate chemistry. You know, to find a lifelong mate is a deliberate strategy to be cautious and to make sure it's the right one.

• 16:34Speaker 02

  These things take time.

• 16:35Speaker 05

  Yeah, there's, there's always hope.

• 16:41Speaker 02

  But now.

• 16:42Speaker 06

  This just feels like the wrong ending to the story.

• 16:45Speaker 02

  Because those birds.

• 16:47Speaker 05

  Unfortunately, yeah, they, they didn't stay.

• 16:49Speaker 02

  Ultimately flew away and didn't come back.

• 16:52Speaker 05

  No.

• 16:53Speaker 02

  And during Chris's tenure on the island, no other gannets would come.

• 16:57Speaker 05

  It could just be where we as humans have chosen to put this potential gannet colony doesn't suit gannets. Maybe the fishing grounds are too far. Maybe the aspect is wrong. Could just be a bunch of things.

• 17:09Speaker 02

  The idea of decoy, like these decoy colonies, is this a thing that they do with other birds and it's successful in other parts of the world or?

• 17:17Speaker 05

  It's a, it's a tried and tested means and it's led to some amazing, amazing conservation successes, bringing birds back to places they, they should be. And, you know, each of those projects that has succeeded has had a lonely first bird, has had a Nigel, and they've made that leap.

• 17:37Speaker 02

  But in this case, actually.

• 17:39Speaker 07

  Thirty first of January, 2018.

• 17:41Speaker 02

  Only a few weeks after those new gannets arrived.

• 17:44Speaker 05

  Bright sunny hot day.

• 17:45Speaker 07

  This is reputed to be the hottest month in New Zealand's history.

• 17:48Speaker 05

  It was a scorcher.

• 17:49Speaker 07

  And the days were baking.

• 17:50Speaker 05

  And I can't remember the reason I went up to the colony, probably just to do some work on the sound speakers. So there's a slight crest of a hill before you look then down on the sweep of the small promontory where the gannet colony is. And I could see right away, something wasn't right.

• 18:10Speaker 02

  Nigel was there in his nest.

• 18:12Speaker 05

  There, but his position wasn't, wasn't right. And I walked down and Nigel was, was just prone with his wings spread out and his head to one side.

• 18:23Speaker 07

  Up in the gannet colony, I found Nigel dead on his nest.

• 18:28Speaker 07

  He had no visible entry.

• 18:35Speaker 06

  Nigel, the lonely gannet, found dead beside his concrete love.

• 18:39Speaker 07

  3rd of February 2018, Nigel's death was published in The Dominion Post.

• 18:43Speaker 02

  The world's loneliest seabird.

• 18:45Speaker 07

  For several days, the phone has not stopped for interviews.

• 18:47Speaker 02

  The futility of his life and bleak melancholy of his end have attracted worldwide attention.

• 18:53Speaker 07

  6th of February 2018.

• 18:54Speaker 06

  Nigel spent his whole life loving, never getting anything in return.

• 18:59Speaker 07

  The world's media seem to like the story of a lovesick bird dying of heartbreak and the stony indifference of his concrete mate.

• 19:06Latif Nasser?

  Oh man, this story is, this is such a bummer.

• 19:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think that's one way to look at it. Nigel, the lonely gannet, may never have found real love. And that's the way that most people looked at it.

• 19:17Speaker 06

  But are we not all Nigel?

• 19:19Speaker 02

  A lot of people saw themselves in Nigel. Nigel stands for all of us who are incapable of facing reality. Their own heartbreak, their own isolation.

• 19:27Speaker 06

  He died as he lived, confused and alone.

• 19:34Speaker 02

  But of course, that's us pacing ourselves into Nigel's story, which, if you're a conservationist like Chris, is not really something you do. But on the other hand...

• 19:44Speaker 05

  I definitely felt a kinship in the way that I think when you work with wild animals, you realize that they are as individual as we are. They all have individual characteristics and personalities. No two are the same, and we're no different.

• 20:02Speaker 02

  Did you ever, did you ever think, is there something wrong with Nigel?

• 20:05Speaker 05

  Well, he, I think he must have been an unusual bird in a way, in that he was one of those, I imagine, he would have been one of those birds who had some more of the instinct to go and try something new, to find a new home.

• 20:23Speaker 02

  Very new, yeah.

• 20:24Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, just like, just like in human populations, most of us, you know, what's takeless to home. I think he was part of that, that more, that group with a bit more wanderlust.

• 20:36Speaker 02

  Gannet populations rely on birds like Nigel, birds that are a little bit different, birds that are willing to try something new. Otherwise, there never would be any new colonies, and the species would be stuck on those same overcrowded cliffs forever. And we can't know, of course, we can't know, we'll never know, but maybe a bird who's not afraid to leave his community, to strike out on his own, maybe that kind of bird is not going to want the thing that we think it should want.

• 21:06Latif Nasser?

  Yeah, like, we clearly know what Chris was thinking and wanted to happen here, but like, we really don't know what Nigel wanted.

• 21:28Speaker 06

  They've all been making plans for Nigel.

• 21:33Speaker 06

  And by "they," I mean the ornithologists.

• 21:41Speaker 06

  They live in houses made of bricks and glass.

• 21:47Speaker 06

  Nigel lives alone at the edge of a cliff.

• 21:53Speaker 06

  The birdbanders fill binders and books with his biography.

• 22:00Speaker 06

  They note his habits and record his walks on tiptoe phones. Meanwhile, Nigel wonders, why don't they ever ask me? I could tell them there's a difference between being lonely and being alone.

• 22:27Speaker 02

  Did you ever feel lonely?

• 22:30Speaker 05

  Um, not really. I, I, I don't really feel, I don't, that's not something I feel too much.

• 22:37Speaker 07

  Alone on Manai sank into a malaise, brought on perhaps by days of grim gray rain, winter darkness barely cheered by the struggling fire kindled from damp wood.

• 22:47Speaker 05

  I mean, I do occasionally, maybe a little bit.

• 22:51Speaker 06

  Nigel's commitment to bachelorhood.

• 22:57Speaker 06

  Called to the concrete colony by a cassette. Nigel noticed the other birds didn't fly or flap around. He remembered an old French peacock had told him, "Hell, his other birds thought, 'Well, this is just the kind of place I'd like to settle down.'"

• 23:36Speaker 02

  Is there still sounds being broadcast out?

• 23:38Speaker 05

  Yes, yes.

• 23:40Speaker 02

  And is his mate, the one that he chose, still there?

• 23:45Speaker 05

  Yes, yes, definitely.

• 23:47Speaker 02

  Really?

• 23:47Speaker 05

  For sure.

• 23:49Speaker 02

  I don't know, for me, I just can't stop thinking about that decoy bird, Nigel's partner. Her faded eyes, right this moment, staring out to sea.

• 24:54Latif Nasser?

  Thank you, Annie, and thank you as well to The Burning Hell, the band that let us play their song about Nigel. Nigel the Gannet is the name of the song. Check them out. You can find more about them and even how you can see them live at theburninghell.com. This episode was reported and produced by Annie McEwen, edited by Alex Neeson, facts checked by Diane Kelly, with voice acting by Maya Appleby Melamed and David Gabel. Special thanks to Melody Thomas and Kirsten Johnstone from the New Zealand narrative podcast company Popzoc Media. Thanks also to Matthias Korn and Ariel Sharat from The Burning Hell, and Stephen Lamke at You've Changed Records. For updates on the epic conservation

• 25:35Latif Nasser?

  project that is Manaw Island, visit Friends of Manaw Island at manawisland.org.nz. I especially recommend that if you are a gannet real estate agent. There's really a lot of vacancy there. Primo properties that are just waiting to be gannetized. It's funny, you just heard a song, but actually, many, many people wrote songs and poems about Nigel, including one piece of music that debuted at the Sydney Opera House. No kidding. Find a link to this, as well as to some other works of art inspired by Nigel, on our website, radiolab.org. And just before we go, if you haven't gotten enough animal stories

• 26:18Latif Nasser?

  for today, I wanted to let you know that the Terrestrials team just dropped a scrappy little episode about the scrappy little raccoon, Jimothy, who, if you don't already know from your social media feed, is the Seattle raccoon that has been going viral this summer. The episode includes an ecologist who has closely studied Jimothy, a disability advocate who tries to make sense of our love for Jimothy, and if that's not enough, the episode is also infused with lots of 90s Seattle grunge nostalgia, because of course it is, given the Terrestrials soundscape. Yeah, anyway, just check it out, you might get a kick out of it. Search for "The Jimothy" over on the Terrestrials podcast. Yeah, that's it for

• 27:01Latif Nasser?

  us. Thank you, thank you, and catch you right back here next week.

• 27:07Speaker 02

  Hi, I'm Jon Quill, and I'm from Brooklyn. And here are the staff credits. Radiolab is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser. Soren Wheeler is our executive editor. Sarah Sandback is our executive director. Our managing editor is Pat Walters. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Jeremy Bloom, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gabel, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Nyanam Sambandhan, Matt Keelty, Mona Madgalka, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sarah Kari, Natalia Ramirez, Joanna Strogatz, Anisa Vitsa, Ariane Whack, Molly Webster, and Jessica Young, with help from Gabby Santos and Maya Appleby Melamed.

• 27:50Speaker 02

  Our fact checkers are Nora Belblydia, Hillary Elkins, Rachel Gross, Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Natalie Middleton, and Sophie Samai.

• 28:03Speaker 02

  Hi, I'm Aubrey, calling from Salt Lake City, Utah. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.