December 9, 2017 • 32 mins
We're revisiting an episode about settlers bringing animals and plants to Australia, including rabbits. The rabbit population exploded, and rabbit-controlling fences were started by the 1880s. Work on the State Barrier Fence began in 1901, and it's still maintained today.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hey, Saturday listeners, Today we do have a classic episode
for you, but we also have a little something special.
We have special guests in house, John Roderick and Ken
Jennings from the new podcast Omnibus, and they are gonna
talk with us for a little bit. We're gonna have
our episode as normal, and then at the end of
this episode you can enjoy a little snippet of their
new podcast, and we think you're really gonna love it.
(00:23):
So first Ken and John tell us about your podcast.
Our project is called Omnibus. John and I have been
concerned for a long time that are increasingly turbulent world.
You know, may face imminent doom at any second, and
I know that's not usually a fun topic to bring
up on a podcast, but our idea is to create
a series of recordings of all human knowledge from our civilizations,
(00:45):
so that just in case that gets lost, we can
we still have these recordings that we can send to
Earthlings of the future, whoever that may be. So the
episode that we have picked for our Classic today is
our prior episode on the rabbit proof fences that were
built in Australia, which were a response to the fact
that people imported rabbits that try to make Australia more
(01:07):
like England. And it reminded me of the very first
episode of Omnibus, which is about a similar story involving starlings. Uh.
Tell us a little bit about that, John or ken Well.
It is a similar story, although this one is full
of even more hubris. I don't want to give too
much away, but the premise of the importation of starlings
(01:31):
to America was that one eccentric millionaire in New York
City wanted to have all of the birds that appear
in Shakespeare's plays present in Central Park. He thought that
would make that would be a that would be an
interesting diversion for him personally, and maybe it would get
(01:52):
his name in the newspaper. And also all the residents
of New York, of course, would love to see the
birds of uh Shakespeare in Central Park. Uh. The eventual
result was that starlings despoiled the entire continent. I guess,
I guess I kind of ruined the ending. Sorry, every
every starling you see sitting outside your window making its
(02:15):
horrendous noise is a descendant of that initial population, which
was a which was a complete folly on the part
of this one person, hundreds of millions of these crude,
murderous birds, all because one rich person had a little
too much free time. Uh. We often talk on our
show about how one person can really tip the scales
(02:35):
of history and change things pretty significantly without giving anything
else away. Uh, could you give us a few hints
about other shows that maybe in the pipeline for you? Well,
we're doing two shows a week, and uh, and every
week Ken will bring in a topic and I will
bring in a topic, and so the Tuesday shows will
be driven by Ken's peculiar fascinations and Thursdays will be mine.
(03:02):
But because I'm lucky enough to be working with Ken,
who has a wide and varied intelligence and knowledge, every
time one of us brings in an idea, the other
has a lot to contribute to the conversation, and we
discuss it in the context of it being some information
that maybe won't be It won't be like a top
(03:25):
tier level of information recorded for posterity. Right are our
premises that even if it is a really big apocalypse,
residents of the future will still be familiar with the Beatles,
but they may not hear about the animals or the Kinks.
So we're there too. We're basically bringing you the kinks.
(03:50):
These are kind of the strange but true footnotes of
culture and science and history. UM. A lot of them
are oddballs, like a man who could picture four dimensional
shapes in his head. UM. Some of them are unusual,
unlikely historical occurrences, like the US and the UK almost
going to war over a hungry pig in the nineteenth century. UM.
(04:13):
Little things like that that we fear may not survive
the inevitable apocalypse, but are very important to know about.
That pig war is important. We have talked about it
on our show before. Also, we love a good pig
war here in the Omnibus, Parker, So we are going
to hop into our Saturday classic for today, which our
(04:34):
is our previous episode about the Australian rabbit proof fences,
and then stay tuned at the end because we are
going to have an awesome preview of Omnibus. I have
listened to the episode on Starlings and I really enjoyed it.
We do well. We are super pleased to be joining
you in the house Stuff Works podcast. Cannon, thanks for
(04:55):
having us. Welcome to stuff you missed in history class
from House Stuff works dot Com. Hi, I am Tracy B. Wilson.
(05:19):
I'm Holly Fry. I welcome to the podcast. So in
our previous episode we talked about the Great Emu War
and something came up in that episode which comes up
pretty often if you are reading about Australia, particularly if
you were reading about the state of Western Australia. It's
the rabbit Proof Fence, which I had known nothing about
before we got into that one. Now I feel like
(05:41):
it keeps coming up when I'm reading things about Australia.
There's also a film I have seen called rabbit Proof
Fence that came out in two thousand and two. It's
about some young girls who were part of the Stolen
Generation of the thirties who follow the rabbit Proof Fence
home to get back to where they came from in Jigalong.
It based on the book Followed the rabbit Proof Fence,
(06:02):
uh and the score in the film is by Peter Gabriel.
I like it quite a lot. I have not seen
the film, but I will make a point too. Yes
it is. It's a little slight digression, but every time
this rabbit Proof Fence comes up, I go Okay, obviously
there are lots of rabbits in Australia. Somebody put up
a big fence. What's really going on with this fence?
And so that's what we're going to talk about in
(06:23):
this episode. Yeah, uh, And first we have to kind
of start with how rabbits got introduced to the environment. Uh.
And the earliest European settlers to Australia, as most people know,
we're convicts and their keepers. But by the mid eighteen
hundreds more affluent English people were starting to settle there
as well. They a lot of them brought animals and
(06:47):
plants from home with them to try to make Australia
feel more like England. These people were known as acclimatizers.
There were acclimatization societies, including the Victorian Acclimatization Society, which
was founded in eighteen sixty one by Edward Wilson. So
really what they were after was to try to make Australia,
which does not feel like England in most places, feel
(07:10):
more like England. Yeah. It was their own weird version
of terraforming to try to turn it somehow into an
English countryside. In a lot of ways, this was deeply
unsuccessful and damaging with this being one example. Enter Thomas Austin.
He was born in Somerset, England, and his uncle James
was a convict settler who had been sent to Hobart Town, Tasmania.
(07:32):
James Austin died before Thomas and his family got to
Tasmania in eighteen thirty one, but they all got money
in his will, and many of the family actually returned
to England, but Thomas and his brother decided uh whose
name was James, decided that they were going to stay
down Under and make a go of it. In eighteen
thirty seven, Thomas and James moved to what would later
(07:54):
become Victoria. Thomas established the estate of Barrowin Park, which
was a forty two room mansion. Eventually he didn't build
that right off the bat, but eventually there was a
forty two room mansion there. It was surrounded by twenty
nine thousand acres of stocked grounds. He farmed sheep and
raised and trained horses, among other things, on all of
(08:16):
this land. And he also really wanted some rabbits. And
he had married Elizabeth Phillips Harting in Melbourne on August
fourteenth of eighteen forty five, and together they had eleven children,
eight of whom survived to adulthood. And he also is
one of the people who introduced sparrows to Australia, which
(08:36):
also later became pests. So here we have Thomas, his family,
his wife living on this estate together really wanting to
introduce rabbits. Uh. There was a demand. They weren't the
only people who were of this mindset. There was a
demand for rabbits in Australia. Early acclimatizers had brought domesticated rabbits,
which did okay when people were looking after them, but
(08:58):
if they managed to escape into the Australian wilderness, they
usually did not manage to survive really well. Sometimes they
would manage to establish a little colony, get kind of
a foothold, but they didn't run rampant anywhere. They did
a little better in Tasmania and some of the other
smaller islands around the main Australian continent, but in general,
(09:21):
domesticated rabbits were not doing so well. No uh, and
Thomas actually asked his nephew, William Mack to bring him
some wild rabbits in an effort to kind of bolster
the population, and William brought twenty four rabbits on the
Clipper Lightning in December of eighteen fifty nine. Eighteen of
those rabbits were feral, and they had just been trapped
(09:41):
and held in an enclosed warren. They weren't domesticated, they
weren'tccustomed to interacting with humans at all. Thomas, in an
act he became quite notorious for doing set thirteen of
the rabbits free. He kept eleven of them and fenced
enclosures on his property, and they multiplied as rabbits do.
Three years later, a flood destroyed part of his fence
(10:04):
and so some of those now huge population of rabbits
escaped into the Australian territory, which caused an explosion of
rabbit population. Yes, by eighteen sixty seven, rabbits were really everywhere,
and Thomas would have rabbit hunting parties at his estate.
Prince Alfred, the Duke of Edinburgh went on a hunting
(10:27):
day in Barrowin Park that year and he shot four
hundred and sixteen rabbits and three and a half hours.
He reportedly had to have attendance on hand to hand
him new guns when the one he was using got
too hot, because he was shooting too fast for his
guns to cool down between shots. By eighteen sixty nine,
the infestation of rabbits was causing property values in some
(10:48):
areas to plummet, and the rabbits themselves. We should point
out we're not the only ones to blame. Farmers were
actually clearing woodland and making it a much more hospitable
environment for the rabbits to thrive in. Their introduction was
in Victoria on the coast and the far southeast of Australia,
and they spread north and west from there. By the
(11:09):
eighteen eighties, the government had started offering bounties on dead
rabbits because there were so many of them, and by
dred rabbits were in all or part of every Australian state.
They were the biggest nuisance outside of the tropical areas.
And so this was less than forty years after they
were introduced to Australia. They were in every state of Australia.
(11:30):
It's a big continent, it is. That's a pretty explosive
population growth for any animal. Uh in less than four
decades to completely engulf a continent is pretty amazing, right.
The rabbits became prey for other introduced species like wildcats,
wild dogs, foxes, and dingos. All of these except for dingoes,
(11:51):
were introduced after the landing of the first Fleet, which
was the eleven ships that reached Australia from Great Britain
in seventeen. A lot of people think of ingoes as
being native to Australia, but they really arrived to Australia
whens humans did about three thousand or four thousand years ago,
So whether to call dingoes native is a subject of debate. Yeah. Uh.
(12:13):
And in addition to the basic nuisance factor that was
going on and the fact that the rabbits were crowding
out native species, they could also completely strip an area
of anything they would eat. That includes food crops that
were intended for people as well as crops that were
intended to support the raising of other animals. So this
also led not only to things going without food, but
(12:35):
also really bad erosion issues. Right. You can find pictures
sometimes of really well maintained rabbit fences and on one
side of the fence will be completely stripped of all vegetation,
and on the other side there will be healthy grass growing.
So it's it's a dramatic difference of rabbits versus no rabbits.
They're extremely thorough in finding every consumable element in an environment. Yes,
(13:05):
and then uh, the great idea happened to build a
fence to help with this problem. Yea. By the eighteen eighties,
people were building fences on their own an attempt and
an attempt to keep rabbits out of their property. Often
this was not effective at all because there were already
rabbits on both sides of the fence, and also rabbits
like to borrow under things, and so even if there
(13:26):
had not been rabbits on both sides of the fence,
the rabbits would just dig a hole underneath and come
up on the other side. So eventually, UH, construction was
begun on what what became the State Barrier Fence, and
that happened from nineteen o one to nineteen o seven,
And this followed a five month investigation by Arthur Mason
which started in eighteen ninety six and a Royal commission
(13:48):
in nineteen o one. So private contractors did the work
on the State Barrier Fence and then handed it over
to the Public Works Department in nineteen o four. The
fence itself, when it was originally being built. Is made
of wooden posts, wire and wire netting with gates every
thirty four kilometers which is about twenty miles, and traps
to try to catch rabbits that did manage to burrow
(14:11):
under it. Usually the crews were cutting timber from the
surrounding trees to make the posts, and if there weren't
any trees they would use metal posts instead. UM. The
netting for the fence also extends underground to try to
prevent burrowing from underneath it, and they would coat the
bottom part of the fence too, in the hope of
keeping it from resting out. So the number one fence
(14:34):
runs from north to south, roughly through the middle of
western Australia. The number three fence stretches out east to
west about midway down the number one fence, and the
number two fence stretches north to south, dividing the zone
created by the number one and number three fences roughly
in half. Yes, so basically there's a fence running the
entire height of Australia from north to south all the
(14:57):
way down. UM. The reason that there are three of
them is because as they were building, rabbits kept getting
ahead of the fence, and so they were sort of
further subdividing to try to keep the rabbits contained. What
they wound up with was three thousand, two hundred and
fifty six kilometers, which is two thousand, twenty three miles
of fence, which cost more than three hundred thousand pounds
(15:19):
at the time. Like we said in the last episode,
Australia was not on the dollar for money at the time,
so it's a little hard to compare what that would
amount to you in today's money. Uh. And the fences
fell under the jurisdiction of I love this title. The
first Chief Inspector of Rabbits, whose name was Alexander Crawford.
At their completion in nineteen o seven, he took over
(15:41):
as Chief Inspector of Rabbits, which is just the best
thing to put up that it's just building the fence
was not enough. They were going to then have to
inspect the fence constantly to make sure that it didn't
get damaged or burrowed under. People would travel the length
of the fence using bicycles, horses and camels to lick
(16:03):
for breaches, and there were huts set up periodically along
the way that people could stay in while they were
doing this inspection. Once motor vehicles became more common, people
did start using them to inspect the fence, but really
in the beginning it was bicycles, horses, camels or on foot,
which is a lot of fence to try to just
inspect it is. And they're, uh, we're not always areas
(16:27):
that motor vehicles could even reach, so they had to
retain some of those slower methods for the those areas
that just couldn't be um arrived at by car. And
there were other anti rabbit fences constructed elsewhere in Australia.
This these three were not the only ones. Now there's
there's the dog fence which goes it's very meandering, but
(16:49):
it's in a roughly east west direction through South Australia,
then along the South Australia Australia Queensland New South Wales
border through queens and almost to the coast. It keeps
dingoes on one side of the fence and was put
up when dingo attacks were happening so frequently that it
had become basically impossible to raise sheep um. Also, in
(17:13):
addition to their being multiple other sort of vermin excluding
fences is the broad category they fall into. The State
barrier fence also discussed deters other animals than rabbits, such
as emails, as we talked about in the previous episode. Now,
the thing is that all of these contracts, all of
these fences remain a little controversial um as to whether
or not they really work, whether their impact on the
(17:36):
bio diversity of the areas outweighs um the benefit of
containing vermin, and so it's it's while they are doing
your jobs. In many cases some people question their validity
as a maintained entity, like are we wasting our time
and money on this? But the Department of Agriculture and
Food in two thousand one decided that the fence was
(17:59):
now would now be maintained by the Department of Agriculture,
the Agriculture Protection Board, the State Barrier Fence Advisory Committee,
local shires and stateholders. So roughly every year the fence
is has about thirty to thirty five kilometers that need replacing.
The new sections have steel posts and more modern prefabricated knitting. Right,
(18:21):
so it's a fense that's still they're still being maintained,
still attempting due to do the job of keeping rabbits
on one side and not on the other side, or
at least fewer rabbits on one side than on the
other side. And rabbits are still a nuisance um right now.
There there's a similarly controversial attempt to introduce diseases into
(18:43):
rabbit populations to try to curb their spread, and there
there are lots of layers of the reasons why that
can be problematic or upsetting to some people, but that
is one of the things that's being done in an
attempt to keep their rabbit population from completely overrunning the
rest of Australia. So one important legacy to look at
(19:13):
is that of the man who brought rabbits to Australia.
Thomas really started to take the blame for the rabbit
infestation pretty early on. He was probably not the only
person to bring rabbits that eventually did multiply. Uh that
that's sort of unlikely, but he was really boastful about
what he was doing. He frequently gave breeding pairs to
(19:36):
people as gifts. Uh So, while it's probably not true
that the entire population of rabbits in Australia now is
the fault of this one guy. He he was kind
of taking the hint. He Yeah, he bragged about his
rabbits a lot, and he made a name for himself
that way. He died on December seventy one, which was
(20:00):
six months after their mansion was finished. His widow eventually
used her money to open a hospital for what they
called incurables in eighty two, and she opened a children's
ward in So they went on to have kind of
a legacy in Australia apart from bringing rabbits to all
the negative rabbit image is not the only thing that
(20:22):
his family left behind, which is good. Yeah, And it's
also good to recognize that while he's getting all the flak,
probably there were many other rabbit people who just did
not make quite the name for themselves that he did. Yeah,
he was not the only person that wanted to turn
Australia into England. It's it's very likely the plenty of
other people were bringing in rabbits as well as other species, right.
(20:44):
And that's the thing that you'll see in other English
colonies and attempts to make other places that are absolutely
not England like England. It's a it's a sort of
a colonial tradition and is absolutely problematic, but is a
thing that definitely contributed in a long lasting way to
a lot of parts of the world, for good or
(21:06):
for illymore and siving this message, we are Ken Jennings
(21:27):
and John Roderick. We speak to you from our present,
which we can only assume is your distant past, the
turbulent time that was the early twenty one century. Fearing
the great cataclysm that will surely befall our civilization, we
began this monumental reference of strange and obscure human knowledge.
These recordings represent our attempt to compile and preserve wonders
and esoterica that would otherwise be lost. So, whether you're
(21:50):
listening from an advanced civilization or have just reinvented the
technology to decrypt our transmissions, this is our legacy to you.
This is our time capsule. This is the offibus you
(22:28):
have access to Entry one dot p S eight four
oh three Certificate number two seven six zero three. The
European Starling. The European Starling is also known as the
common Starling. The problem is that at least an our era,
(22:52):
it's much too common and not nearly European enough. Uh.
This is a story that begins back in eighteen nine. Indeed,
on March six, there's an eccentric, wealthy pharmaceutical manufacturer in
New York named Eugene Schifflin who goes to Central Park
because he is a man with a dream. He's a
(23:13):
man with a very weird dream. Funny that that an
eccentric pharmaceutical magnate would also be a guy with a
weird dream. To be honest with you, the weird dream
is the only evidence I have that he's eccentric. I
have no idea if he like also dresses up as
a bear and runs down you know. Uh. But on
this particular day, he's in service of this dream that
(23:34):
has been animating him for many years, which is for
some reason, to introduce to North America every species of
bird that appears in the works of William Shakespeare. He's
a lover, as so many of us are, of both
Shakespeare and birds. Well, and that was when we were
we hadn't yet decided how exactly we were going to
make America all the way through. And that I'm sure
(23:55):
that made perfect sense. I think he did. He was
a member of a society called something like the America
An acclimatization society, which really was like, how do we
get all the good stuff from Europe into this new
sort of suspect, shabby country. Yeah right, the good stuff
from Europe apparently, and the Irish and the Irish of birds,
(24:16):
the European starling alight. So he wants to introduce every
bird from Shakespeare. Unfortunately for Posterity and Henry. The fourth
part one, Shakespeare brings up starlings, which in his time
we're famous for their sense of mimicry. Like a starling
doesn't just have one call, I can have dozens. It
can make like any noise. Do you have access to
the Shakespeare quote? Yeah? So early in the play, Hotspur
(24:40):
is very angry at King Henry. He wants Harry to
ransom one of Henry's political enemies, a guy named Edmund Mortimer,
and Henry forbids him to talk about this, and so,
in the manner of shakespeare play, as soon as Henry
turns his back, Hotspur turns to the audience and starts
scheming about how he's gonna keep bugging the king about
Mortimer and one of his plans, one of his very
improbable plans. He says, nay, I'll have a starling. She'll
(25:02):
be taught to speak nothing but Mortimer and give it
him to keep his anger still in motion Mortimer. Yeah,
So as any of us would do in this situation,
Hospera wants to train a hypothetical bird to say the
word Mortimer and bother the king with that. Quoth the
starling Mortimer. Uh, And I'm not sure. I'm not sure
(25:23):
if he if he just thinks that'll annoy the king,
or the king will eventually change his mind. Hey, this
bird is onto something Mortimer anyway. But the point of
it is that the word starling only appears once in
you know, the million million word corpus of Shakespeare. But
that was enough for Eugene chief Win. Shakespeare had Starling's damn,
it's almost America. Let me ask. Was Eugene Chieflin responsible
(25:44):
for the introduction of many other birds from Shakespeare into
Central Park? I don't know if there's any Uh, I
don't know of any evidence the starling was his his
only contribution to this, his greatest work. It's like play
the heads Eugene free bird. So then what happened free starling? Uh?
He releases Uh. I don't know like thirty or forty
(26:05):
birds into Central Park and uh doesn't hear back? And
I think a few months later does it again? Releases
a bunch more, and a matter of years later he
learns that there is actually a pair of starlings, European
starlings nesting in the eaves of the Museum of Natural
History across from the park. And this, I can only
imagine was an amazing day for our hero Mr Chi.
(26:26):
Can you imagine a better place for them than the
eaves of the Museum of Natural History? He just loves it.
Starlings have come to his country. Can you imagine being
a passenger on the ship that has like between sixty
and a hundred starlings on it? Multiple times? It's true
he had to import these from something, right, I mean
that he had to first of all, capture eighty starlings,
(26:47):
let's say, cage them, bring them. It might not be
him personally. The American acclimatization society might be a a vast,
a vast mechanism. He might have underlings combing England, employing starlings,
employing people in like cloth caps to do this work.
So for him, it's just a whim. It's a. It's
(27:08):
an artistic fancy. He's he's a rich guy with a
weird hobby. No idea that this will change the course
of history, because what has happened in the succeeding a
hundred and you know, from where we sit a hundred
and twenty seven years for you listening to us, this
is this is centuries over the past. Yeah, we don't
we don't know what your starling situation is, but in
our world it's not great. Actually, from the that one
(27:30):
breeding pair in the eaves of the museum, they're now
two hundred and twenty million starlings European starlings in America.
You know, if you see just some random gray spotted
bird flying around near your home or in the country,
it's probably a starling because they have come to dominate
the country. They they're really bad for native songbird populations
(27:51):
because their nest bandits what their nest bandits. So tell
me more. They don't like other birds. They only building nests.
You know, they can nest anywhere. They'll nest in a
little hole, which so you know, newly deforested, suburbanized America
is great for them. You know, get any gas station
or porch or nook of your house. You know, starlings
can't find a hole there, but those are in short supply.
(28:12):
So what they will do is they'll they'll they'll wait
at the entrance to a hole, and if a bluebird
or a woodpeck or whatever sticks its head out, the
starling will impale it with its beak until it dies,
kill the eggs, if there's any eggs, and just take
over the whole. I dated somebody like this. This is
almost an exact description of our relationship. And Starlings are
also super loud and super annoying. They are because they'll
(28:33):
you know, they can mimic any call, so you know,
they make these sort of gross noises in you know,
automobile heavy America. They now make car centric noises. They'll
imitate the noises of crossing signals or of car engines.
You know, starlings living near interstate will just sound like
cars whizzing by. Uh, because that's absolutely true. They you know,
they're they just want to fit in, you know, aren't
(28:54):
they aren't we all starlings at art like that a
little bit. That's not annoying at all, Although now that
you're saying, aren't we all starlings. Of course, the most
famous human starling is Clarice Starling from the Silence of
the Lambs. She says she's a bit of a predator.
She seems harmless on the outside, but when she gets
her teeth in a in a case, her beak, she
(29:14):
gets her beak in a case. When she gets a
beacon her case, she doesn't like, you know, Lector finds
out she's a force to be reckoned. With that, I
wonder if that's what the references. She's gonna not only
not only kill Lector, but all of the eggs in
his nest. So the victims of the European starling are
all of us many well, yeah, I mean humans included.
(29:35):
Birds are birds. Bird populations have been decimated. They're believed
to have contributed to the extinction of the Carolina parakeet
and the passenger pigeon, so you know, whole species are
on their hit list. I thought that the passenger pigeon
went extinct entirely as a result of like wanton human hunting.
Did the starling really play a role? Are we absolved
(29:56):
somewhat of the responsibility of destroying the passenger pige I
don't like they once. You know, they said they would
once fly overhead for days, right, because I would say,
the passenger pigeon like in the sky flock would start
and then it would just be like twilight for like
eight hours as they passed over. You know, there were
so many and they were delicious, so we ate them all.
And it always amazed me that we could even conceivably
(30:17):
have killed that many birds. Now, thinking that maybe the
Starlings are responsible makes me feel like we owe fewer
reparations to the passenger pigeons community. I don't think should
feel better because think about this, like we also created
the Starlings, you know, like at least the people shooting
the pigeons were like, I know, I'm killing this guy.
You know, this was just some out of touch rich
guy who was like, you know what the world needs
these two starlings, Dick and Betsy, and he has no idea.
(30:39):
I imagine sitting in the drawing room of some fancy
lady's house on the Upper East Side talking about having
introduced all the birds from Shakespeare's plays into Central Park.
I think that was probably a pretty winning line at
the time, right when people were dropping handkerchiefs on the
floor as a supreme mating signal. If I were in
that Edith Wharton drawing him like I think my monica
(31:01):
would fall into my soup. If some if some strange
man and a goatee started bragging about his successful ornithological acclimatizations,
almost surely he had a Trotsky goatee, almost surely. Thank
(31:22):
you so much for joining us for this Saturday classic.
Since this is out of the archive, if you heard
an email address or a Facebook U r L or
something similar during the course of the show, that may
be obsolete. Now, so here's our current contact information. We
are at History Podcast at how stuff Works dot com,
and then we're at Missed in the History all over
(31:42):
social media that is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Pinterest,
and Instagram. Thanks again for listening for more on this
and thousands of other topics because it how stuff Works
dot com.
Hey, Saturday listeners, Today we do have a classic episode
for you, but we also have a little something special.
We have special guests in house, John Roderick and Ken
Jennings from the new podcast Omnibus, and they are gonna
talk with us for a little bit. We're gonna have
our episode as normal, and then at the end of
this episode you can enjoy a little snippet of their
new podcast, and we think you're really gonna love it.
(00:23):
So first Ken and John tell us about your podcast.
Our project is called Omnibus. John and I have been
concerned for a long time that are increasingly turbulent world.
You know, may face imminent doom at any second, and
I know that's not usually a fun topic to bring
up on a podcast, but our idea is to create
a series of recordings of all human knowledge from our civilizations,
(00:45):
so that just in case that gets lost, we can
we still have these recordings that we can send to
Earthlings of the future, whoever that may be. So the
episode that we have picked for our Classic today is
our prior episode on the rabbit proof fences that were
built in Australia, which were a response to the fact
that people imported rabbits that try to make Australia more
(01:07):
like England. And it reminded me of the very first
episode of Omnibus, which is about a similar story involving starlings. Uh.
Tell us a little bit about that, John or ken Well.
It is a similar story, although this one is full
of even more hubris. I don't want to give too
much away, but the premise of the importation of starlings
(01:31):
to America was that one eccentric millionaire in New York
City wanted to have all of the birds that appear
in Shakespeare's plays present in Central Park. He thought that
would make that would be a that would be an
interesting diversion for him personally, and maybe it would get
(01:52):
his name in the newspaper. And also all the residents
of New York, of course, would love to see the
birds of uh Shakespeare in Central Park. Uh. The eventual
result was that starlings despoiled the entire continent. I guess,
I guess I kind of ruined the ending. Sorry, every
every starling you see sitting outside your window making its
(02:15):
horrendous noise is a descendant of that initial population, which
was a which was a complete folly on the part
of this one person, hundreds of millions of these crude,
murderous birds, all because one rich person had a little
too much free time. Uh. We often talk on our
show about how one person can really tip the scales
(02:35):
of history and change things pretty significantly without giving anything
else away. Uh, could you give us a few hints
about other shows that maybe in the pipeline for you? Well,
we're doing two shows a week, and uh, and every
week Ken will bring in a topic and I will
bring in a topic, and so the Tuesday shows will
be driven by Ken's peculiar fascinations and Thursdays will be mine.
(03:02):
But because I'm lucky enough to be working with Ken,
who has a wide and varied intelligence and knowledge, every
time one of us brings in an idea, the other
has a lot to contribute to the conversation, and we
discuss it in the context of it being some information
that maybe won't be It won't be like a top
(03:25):
tier level of information recorded for posterity. Right are our
premises that even if it is a really big apocalypse,
residents of the future will still be familiar with the Beatles,
but they may not hear about the animals or the Kinks.
So we're there too. We're basically bringing you the kinks.
(03:50):
These are kind of the strange but true footnotes of
culture and science and history. UM. A lot of them
are oddballs, like a man who could picture four dimensional
shapes in his head. UM. Some of them are unusual,
unlikely historical occurrences, like the US and the UK almost
going to war over a hungry pig in the nineteenth century. UM.
(04:13):
Little things like that that we fear may not survive
the inevitable apocalypse, but are very important to know about.
That pig war is important. We have talked about it
on our show before. Also, we love a good pig
war here in the Omnibus, Parker, So we are going
to hop into our Saturday classic for today, which our
(04:34):
is our previous episode about the Australian rabbit proof fences,
and then stay tuned at the end because we are
going to have an awesome preview of Omnibus. I have
listened to the episode on Starlings and I really enjoyed it.
We do well. We are super pleased to be joining
you in the house Stuff Works podcast. Cannon, thanks for
(04:55):
having us. Welcome to stuff you missed in history class
from House Stuff works dot Com. Hi, I am Tracy B. Wilson.
(05:19):
I'm Holly Fry. I welcome to the podcast. So in
our previous episode we talked about the Great Emu War
and something came up in that episode which comes up
pretty often if you are reading about Australia, particularly if
you were reading about the state of Western Australia. It's
the rabbit Proof Fence, which I had known nothing about
before we got into that one. Now I feel like
(05:41):
it keeps coming up when I'm reading things about Australia.
There's also a film I have seen called rabbit Proof
Fence that came out in two thousand and two. It's
about some young girls who were part of the Stolen
Generation of the thirties who follow the rabbit Proof Fence
home to get back to where they came from in Jigalong.
It based on the book Followed the rabbit Proof Fence,
(06:02):
uh and the score in the film is by Peter Gabriel.
I like it quite a lot. I have not seen
the film, but I will make a point too. Yes
it is. It's a little slight digression, but every time
this rabbit Proof Fence comes up, I go Okay, obviously
there are lots of rabbits in Australia. Somebody put up
a big fence. What's really going on with this fence?
And so that's what we're going to talk about in
(06:23):
this episode. Yeah, uh, And first we have to kind
of start with how rabbits got introduced to the environment. Uh.
And the earliest European settlers to Australia, as most people know,
we're convicts and their keepers. But by the mid eighteen
hundreds more affluent English people were starting to settle there
as well. They a lot of them brought animals and
(06:47):
plants from home with them to try to make Australia
feel more like England. These people were known as acclimatizers.
There were acclimatization societies, including the Victorian Acclimatization Society, which
was founded in eighteen sixty one by Edward Wilson. So
really what they were after was to try to make Australia,
which does not feel like England in most places, feel
(07:10):
more like England. Yeah. It was their own weird version
of terraforming to try to turn it somehow into an
English countryside. In a lot of ways, this was deeply
unsuccessful and damaging with this being one example. Enter Thomas Austin.
He was born in Somerset, England, and his uncle James
was a convict settler who had been sent to Hobart Town, Tasmania.
(07:32):
James Austin died before Thomas and his family got to
Tasmania in eighteen thirty one, but they all got money
in his will, and many of the family actually returned
to England, but Thomas and his brother decided uh whose
name was James, decided that they were going to stay
down Under and make a go of it. In eighteen
thirty seven, Thomas and James moved to what would later
(07:54):
become Victoria. Thomas established the estate of Barrowin Park, which
was a forty two room mansion. Eventually he didn't build
that right off the bat, but eventually there was a
forty two room mansion there. It was surrounded by twenty
nine thousand acres of stocked grounds. He farmed sheep and
raised and trained horses, among other things, on all of
(08:16):
this land. And he also really wanted some rabbits. And
he had married Elizabeth Phillips Harting in Melbourne on August
fourteenth of eighteen forty five, and together they had eleven children,
eight of whom survived to adulthood. And he also is
one of the people who introduced sparrows to Australia, which
(08:36):
also later became pests. So here we have Thomas, his family,
his wife living on this estate together really wanting to
introduce rabbits. Uh. There was a demand. They weren't the
only people who were of this mindset. There was a
demand for rabbits in Australia. Early acclimatizers had brought domesticated rabbits,
which did okay when people were looking after them, but
(08:58):
if they managed to escape into the Australian wilderness, they
usually did not manage to survive really well. Sometimes they
would manage to establish a little colony, get kind of
a foothold, but they didn't run rampant anywhere. They did
a little better in Tasmania and some of the other
smaller islands around the main Australian continent, but in general,
(09:21):
domesticated rabbits were not doing so well. No uh, and
Thomas actually asked his nephew, William Mack to bring him
some wild rabbits in an effort to kind of bolster
the population, and William brought twenty four rabbits on the
Clipper Lightning in December of eighteen fifty nine. Eighteen of
those rabbits were feral, and they had just been trapped
(09:41):
and held in an enclosed warren. They weren't domesticated, they
weren'tccustomed to interacting with humans at all. Thomas, in an
act he became quite notorious for doing set thirteen of
the rabbits free. He kept eleven of them and fenced
enclosures on his property, and they multiplied as rabbits do.
Three years later, a flood destroyed part of his fence
(10:04):
and so some of those now huge population of rabbits
escaped into the Australian territory, which caused an explosion of
rabbit population. Yes, by eighteen sixty seven, rabbits were really everywhere,
and Thomas would have rabbit hunting parties at his estate.
Prince Alfred, the Duke of Edinburgh went on a hunting
(10:27):
day in Barrowin Park that year and he shot four
hundred and sixteen rabbits and three and a half hours.
He reportedly had to have attendance on hand to hand
him new guns when the one he was using got
too hot, because he was shooting too fast for his
guns to cool down between shots. By eighteen sixty nine,
the infestation of rabbits was causing property values in some
(10:48):
areas to plummet, and the rabbits themselves. We should point
out we're not the only ones to blame. Farmers were
actually clearing woodland and making it a much more hospitable
environment for the rabbits to thrive in. Their introduction was
in Victoria on the coast and the far southeast of Australia,
and they spread north and west from there. By the
(11:09):
eighteen eighties, the government had started offering bounties on dead
rabbits because there were so many of them, and by
dred rabbits were in all or part of every Australian state.
They were the biggest nuisance outside of the tropical areas.
And so this was less than forty years after they
were introduced to Australia. They were in every state of Australia.
(11:30):
It's a big continent, it is. That's a pretty explosive
population growth for any animal. Uh in less than four
decades to completely engulf a continent is pretty amazing, right.
The rabbits became prey for other introduced species like wildcats,
wild dogs, foxes, and dingos. All of these except for dingoes,
(11:51):
were introduced after the landing of the first Fleet, which
was the eleven ships that reached Australia from Great Britain
in seventeen. A lot of people think of ingoes as
being native to Australia, but they really arrived to Australia
whens humans did about three thousand or four thousand years ago,
So whether to call dingoes native is a subject of debate. Yeah. Uh.
(12:13):
And in addition to the basic nuisance factor that was
going on and the fact that the rabbits were crowding
out native species, they could also completely strip an area
of anything they would eat. That includes food crops that
were intended for people as well as crops that were
intended to support the raising of other animals. So this
also led not only to things going without food, but
(12:35):
also really bad erosion issues. Right. You can find pictures
sometimes of really well maintained rabbit fences and on one
side of the fence will be completely stripped of all vegetation,
and on the other side there will be healthy grass growing.
So it's it's a dramatic difference of rabbits versus no rabbits.
They're extremely thorough in finding every consumable element in an environment. Yes,
(13:05):
and then uh, the great idea happened to build a
fence to help with this problem. Yea. By the eighteen eighties,
people were building fences on their own an attempt and
an attempt to keep rabbits out of their property. Often
this was not effective at all because there were already
rabbits on both sides of the fence, and also rabbits
like to borrow under things, and so even if there
(13:26):
had not been rabbits on both sides of the fence,
the rabbits would just dig a hole underneath and come
up on the other side. So eventually, UH, construction was
begun on what what became the State Barrier Fence, and
that happened from nineteen o one to nineteen o seven,
And this followed a five month investigation by Arthur Mason
which started in eighteen ninety six and a Royal commission
(13:48):
in nineteen o one. So private contractors did the work
on the State Barrier Fence and then handed it over
to the Public Works Department in nineteen o four. The
fence itself, when it was originally being built. Is made
of wooden posts, wire and wire netting with gates every
thirty four kilometers which is about twenty miles, and traps
to try to catch rabbits that did manage to burrow
(14:11):
under it. Usually the crews were cutting timber from the
surrounding trees to make the posts, and if there weren't
any trees they would use metal posts instead. UM. The
netting for the fence also extends underground to try to
prevent burrowing from underneath it, and they would coat the
bottom part of the fence too, in the hope of
keeping it from resting out. So the number one fence
(14:34):
runs from north to south, roughly through the middle of
western Australia. The number three fence stretches out east to
west about midway down the number one fence, and the
number two fence stretches north to south, dividing the zone
created by the number one and number three fences roughly
in half. Yes, so basically there's a fence running the
entire height of Australia from north to south all the
(14:57):
way down. UM. The reason that there are three of
them is because as they were building, rabbits kept getting
ahead of the fence, and so they were sort of
further subdividing to try to keep the rabbits contained. What
they wound up with was three thousand, two hundred and
fifty six kilometers, which is two thousand, twenty three miles
of fence, which cost more than three hundred thousand pounds
(15:19):
at the time. Like we said in the last episode,
Australia was not on the dollar for money at the time,
so it's a little hard to compare what that would
amount to you in today's money. Uh. And the fences
fell under the jurisdiction of I love this title. The
first Chief Inspector of Rabbits, whose name was Alexander Crawford.
At their completion in nineteen o seven, he took over
(15:41):
as Chief Inspector of Rabbits, which is just the best
thing to put up that it's just building the fence
was not enough. They were going to then have to
inspect the fence constantly to make sure that it didn't
get damaged or burrowed under. People would travel the length
of the fence using bicycles, horses and camels to lick
(16:03):
for breaches, and there were huts set up periodically along
the way that people could stay in while they were
doing this inspection. Once motor vehicles became more common, people
did start using them to inspect the fence, but really
in the beginning it was bicycles, horses, camels or on foot,
which is a lot of fence to try to just
inspect it is. And they're, uh, we're not always areas
(16:27):
that motor vehicles could even reach, so they had to
retain some of those slower methods for the those areas
that just couldn't be um arrived at by car. And
there were other anti rabbit fences constructed elsewhere in Australia.
This these three were not the only ones. Now there's
there's the dog fence which goes it's very meandering, but
(16:49):
it's in a roughly east west direction through South Australia,
then along the South Australia Australia Queensland New South Wales
border through queens and almost to the coast. It keeps
dingoes on one side of the fence and was put
up when dingo attacks were happening so frequently that it
had become basically impossible to raise sheep um. Also, in
(17:13):
addition to their being multiple other sort of vermin excluding
fences is the broad category they fall into. The State
barrier fence also discussed deters other animals than rabbits, such
as emails, as we talked about in the previous episode. Now,
the thing is that all of these contracts, all of
these fences remain a little controversial um as to whether
or not they really work, whether their impact on the
(17:36):
bio diversity of the areas outweighs um the benefit of
containing vermin, and so it's it's while they are doing
your jobs. In many cases some people question their validity
as a maintained entity, like are we wasting our time
and money on this? But the Department of Agriculture and
Food in two thousand one decided that the fence was
(17:59):
now would now be maintained by the Department of Agriculture,
the Agriculture Protection Board, the State Barrier Fence Advisory Committee,
local shires and stateholders. So roughly every year the fence
is has about thirty to thirty five kilometers that need replacing.
The new sections have steel posts and more modern prefabricated knitting. Right,
(18:21):
so it's a fense that's still they're still being maintained,
still attempting due to do the job of keeping rabbits
on one side and not on the other side, or
at least fewer rabbits on one side than on the
other side. And rabbits are still a nuisance um right now.
There there's a similarly controversial attempt to introduce diseases into
(18:43):
rabbit populations to try to curb their spread, and there
there are lots of layers of the reasons why that
can be problematic or upsetting to some people, but that
is one of the things that's being done in an
attempt to keep their rabbit population from completely overrunning the
rest of Australia. So one important legacy to look at
(19:13):
is that of the man who brought rabbits to Australia.
Thomas really started to take the blame for the rabbit
infestation pretty early on. He was probably not the only
person to bring rabbits that eventually did multiply. Uh that
that's sort of unlikely, but he was really boastful about
what he was doing. He frequently gave breeding pairs to
(19:36):
people as gifts. Uh So, while it's probably not true
that the entire population of rabbits in Australia now is
the fault of this one guy. He he was kind
of taking the hint. He Yeah, he bragged about his
rabbits a lot, and he made a name for himself
that way. He died on December seventy one, which was
(20:00):
six months after their mansion was finished. His widow eventually
used her money to open a hospital for what they
called incurables in eighty two, and she opened a children's
ward in So they went on to have kind of
a legacy in Australia apart from bringing rabbits to all
the negative rabbit image is not the only thing that
(20:22):
his family left behind, which is good. Yeah, And it's
also good to recognize that while he's getting all the flak,
probably there were many other rabbit people who just did
not make quite the name for themselves that he did. Yeah,
he was not the only person that wanted to turn
Australia into England. It's it's very likely the plenty of
other people were bringing in rabbits as well as other species, right.
(20:44):
And that's the thing that you'll see in other English
colonies and attempts to make other places that are absolutely
not England like England. It's a it's a sort of
a colonial tradition and is absolutely problematic, but is a
thing that definitely contributed in a long lasting way to
a lot of parts of the world, for good or
(21:06):
for illymore and siving this message, we are Ken Jennings
(21:27):
and John Roderick. We speak to you from our present,
which we can only assume is your distant past, the
turbulent time that was the early twenty one century. Fearing
the great cataclysm that will surely befall our civilization, we
began this monumental reference of strange and obscure human knowledge.
These recordings represent our attempt to compile and preserve wonders
and esoterica that would otherwise be lost. So, whether you're
(21:50):
listening from an advanced civilization or have just reinvented the
technology to decrypt our transmissions, this is our legacy to you.
This is our time capsule. This is the offibus you
(22:28):
have access to Entry one dot p S eight four
oh three Certificate number two seven six zero three. The
European Starling. The European Starling is also known as the
common Starling. The problem is that at least an our era,
(22:52):
it's much too common and not nearly European enough. Uh.
This is a story that begins back in eighteen nine. Indeed,
on March six, there's an eccentric, wealthy pharmaceutical manufacturer in
New York named Eugene Schifflin who goes to Central Park
because he is a man with a dream. He's a
(23:13):
man with a very weird dream. Funny that that an
eccentric pharmaceutical magnate would also be a guy with a
weird dream. To be honest with you, the weird dream
is the only evidence I have that he's eccentric. I
have no idea if he like also dresses up as
a bear and runs down you know. Uh. But on
this particular day, he's in service of this dream that
(23:34):
has been animating him for many years, which is for
some reason, to introduce to North America every species of
bird that appears in the works of William Shakespeare. He's
a lover, as so many of us are, of both
Shakespeare and birds. Well, and that was when we were
we hadn't yet decided how exactly we were going to
make America all the way through. And that I'm sure
(23:55):
that made perfect sense. I think he did. He was
a member of a society called something like the America
An acclimatization society, which really was like, how do we
get all the good stuff from Europe into this new
sort of suspect, shabby country. Yeah right, the good stuff
from Europe apparently, and the Irish and the Irish of birds,
(24:16):
the European starling alight. So he wants to introduce every
bird from Shakespeare. Unfortunately for Posterity and Henry. The fourth
part one, Shakespeare brings up starlings, which in his time
we're famous for their sense of mimicry. Like a starling
doesn't just have one call, I can have dozens. It
can make like any noise. Do you have access to
the Shakespeare quote? Yeah? So early in the play, Hotspur
(24:40):
is very angry at King Henry. He wants Harry to
ransom one of Henry's political enemies, a guy named Edmund Mortimer,
and Henry forbids him to talk about this, and so,
in the manner of shakespeare play, as soon as Henry
turns his back, Hotspur turns to the audience and starts
scheming about how he's gonna keep bugging the king about
Mortimer and one of his plans, one of his very
improbable plans. He says, nay, I'll have a starling. She'll
(25:02):
be taught to speak nothing but Mortimer and give it
him to keep his anger still in motion Mortimer. Yeah,
So as any of us would do in this situation,
Hospera wants to train a hypothetical bird to say the
word Mortimer and bother the king with that. Quoth the
starling Mortimer. Uh, And I'm not sure. I'm not sure
(25:23):
if he if he just thinks that'll annoy the king,
or the king will eventually change his mind. Hey, this
bird is onto something Mortimer anyway. But the point of
it is that the word starling only appears once in
you know, the million million word corpus of Shakespeare. But
that was enough for Eugene chief Win. Shakespeare had Starling's damn,
it's almost America. Let me ask. Was Eugene Chieflin responsible
(25:44):
for the introduction of many other birds from Shakespeare into
Central Park? I don't know if there's any Uh, I
don't know of any evidence the starling was his his
only contribution to this, his greatest work. It's like play
the heads Eugene free bird. So then what happened free starling? Uh?
He releases Uh. I don't know like thirty or forty
(26:05):
birds into Central Park and uh doesn't hear back? And
I think a few months later does it again? Releases
a bunch more, and a matter of years later he
learns that there is actually a pair of starlings, European
starlings nesting in the eaves of the Museum of Natural
History across from the park. And this, I can only
imagine was an amazing day for our hero Mr Chi.
(26:26):
Can you imagine a better place for them than the
eaves of the Museum of Natural History? He just loves it.
Starlings have come to his country. Can you imagine being
a passenger on the ship that has like between sixty
and a hundred starlings on it? Multiple times? It's true
he had to import these from something, right, I mean
that he had to first of all, capture eighty starlings,
(26:47):
let's say, cage them, bring them. It might not be
him personally. The American acclimatization society might be a a vast,
a vast mechanism. He might have underlings combing England, employing starlings,
employing people in like cloth caps to do this work.
So for him, it's just a whim. It's a. It's
(27:08):
an artistic fancy. He's he's a rich guy with a
weird hobby. No idea that this will change the course
of history, because what has happened in the succeeding a
hundred and you know, from where we sit a hundred
and twenty seven years for you listening to us, this
is this is centuries over the past. Yeah, we don't
we don't know what your starling situation is, but in
our world it's not great. Actually, from the that one
(27:30):
breeding pair in the eaves of the museum, they're now
two hundred and twenty million starlings European starlings in America.
You know, if you see just some random gray spotted
bird flying around near your home or in the country,
it's probably a starling because they have come to dominate
the country. They they're really bad for native songbird populations
(27:51):
because their nest bandits what their nest bandits. So tell
me more. They don't like other birds. They only building nests.
You know, they can nest anywhere. They'll nest in a
little hole, which so you know, newly deforested, suburbanized America
is great for them. You know, get any gas station
or porch or nook of your house. You know, starlings
can't find a hole there, but those are in short supply.
(28:12):
So what they will do is they'll they'll they'll wait
at the entrance to a hole, and if a bluebird
or a woodpeck or whatever sticks its head out, the
starling will impale it with its beak until it dies,
kill the eggs, if there's any eggs, and just take
over the whole. I dated somebody like this. This is
almost an exact description of our relationship. And Starlings are
also super loud and super annoying. They are because they'll
(28:33):
you know, they can mimic any call, so you know,
they make these sort of gross noises in you know,
automobile heavy America. They now make car centric noises. They'll
imitate the noises of crossing signals or of car engines.
You know, starlings living near interstate will just sound like
cars whizzing by. Uh, because that's absolutely true. They you know,
they're they just want to fit in, you know, aren't
(28:54):
they aren't we all starlings at art like that a
little bit. That's not annoying at all, Although now that
you're saying, aren't we all starlings. Of course, the most
famous human starling is Clarice Starling from the Silence of
the Lambs. She says she's a bit of a predator.
She seems harmless on the outside, but when she gets
her teeth in a in a case, her beak, she
(29:14):
gets her beak in a case. When she gets a
beacon her case, she doesn't like, you know, Lector finds
out she's a force to be reckoned. With that, I
wonder if that's what the references. She's gonna not only
not only kill Lector, but all of the eggs in
his nest. So the victims of the European starling are
all of us many well, yeah, I mean humans included.
(29:35):
Birds are birds. Bird populations have been decimated. They're believed
to have contributed to the extinction of the Carolina parakeet
and the passenger pigeon, so you know, whole species are
on their hit list. I thought that the passenger pigeon
went extinct entirely as a result of like wanton human hunting.
Did the starling really play a role? Are we absolved
(29:56):
somewhat of the responsibility of destroying the passenger pige I
don't like they once. You know, they said they would
once fly overhead for days, right, because I would say,
the passenger pigeon like in the sky flock would start
and then it would just be like twilight for like
eight hours as they passed over. You know, there were
so many and they were delicious, so we ate them all.
And it always amazed me that we could even conceivably
(30:17):
have killed that many birds. Now, thinking that maybe the
Starlings are responsible makes me feel like we owe fewer
reparations to the passenger pigeons community. I don't think should
feel better because think about this, like we also created
the Starlings, you know, like at least the people shooting
the pigeons were like, I know, I'm killing this guy.
You know, this was just some out of touch rich
guy who was like, you know what the world needs
these two starlings, Dick and Betsy, and he has no idea.
(30:39):
I imagine sitting in the drawing room of some fancy
lady's house on the Upper East Side talking about having
introduced all the birds from Shakespeare's plays into Central Park.
I think that was probably a pretty winning line at
the time, right when people were dropping handkerchiefs on the
floor as a supreme mating signal. If I were in
that Edith Wharton drawing him like I think my monica
(31:01):
would fall into my soup. If some if some strange
man and a goatee started bragging about his successful ornithological acclimatizations,
almost surely he had a Trotsky goatee, almost surely. Thank
(31:22):
you so much for joining us for this Saturday classic.
Since this is out of the archive, if you heard
an email address or a Facebook U r L or
something similar during the course of the show, that may
be obsolete. Now, so here's our current contact information. We
are at History Podcast at how stuff Works dot com,
and then we're at Missed in the History all over
(31:42):
social media that is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Pinterest,
and Instagram. Thanks again for listening for more on this
and thousands of other topics because it how stuff Works
dot com.
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