August 3, 2025 • 50 mins
A fascinating chat about Australian Magpies (Gymnorhina tibicen) with Dr. Grainne Cleary in which we talk about the role of stories in creating monsters, the role of citizen science, and lots of cool biology facts about these birds. Not everything about Magpies is black and white, it turns out.
Why do birds do that? (affiliate link)
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Why do birds do that? (affiliate link)
Your Backyard Birds (booktopia - Australian bookshop)
And remember:
Why do Birds Sing? will be dropping into stores September 2nd, 2025!
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/monstertalk--6267523/support.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
Monster House Presents.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Hey, they're Monster Talkers. It's been a rough week here
at Munster talk manner. In twenty twenty, like many of you,
I had my life turned upside down by the pandemic
and the economic hit of that disaster, and for the
second time in my career, I had to burn down
through my life savings to survive. But thanks to a
listener to this very show, I got introduced to a
manager at Stanford University and just in the nick of time,
(00:33):
landed the most amazing job that I never even dreamed
of doing. I was a robotic process automation specialist for
Stanford University. In the past five years have been incredible.
My fascination with innovation, especially in the computing space, had
put Stanford in an elevated place in my heart because,
along with my Tea, it's one of those key birthplaces
(00:55):
of much of the tech that makes this modern world work.
I was working remotely, but times I got to go
visit campus, and my first visit I stayed on campus
at the hotel next to the Stanford Linear Accelerator or SLACK,
and I made a pilgrimage to so many Silicon Valley
sites and when I went to go get coffee and
pull Ya Hall. It was next to Vince Serf's old
(01:15):
office where he helped create TCPIP And when I visited
my clients in Pinehall, it's where Cisco's Systems was born.
And my first units experience had been on SUN named
for Stanford University Networks. This was a dream job, and
for the first time in my life, I thought I
had found a place where I could actually work until
I retired. Well, I don't like to talk about politics,
(01:37):
but this current administration is run by very wealthy people,
and a couple of them and I'm looking at you,
Peter Thiel and Mark and Dreesen really hate Stanford and
universities in general. The administration is attacking many universities, and
they're cutting federal funding for science research, and they're attacking
the universities themselves with punitive tax hikes. It's almost like
(01:59):
this administration doesn't want people to have higher education at all,
or perhaps any education, to be blunt. Anyway, they hit
Stanford with one hundred and fifty million dollars budget shortage
because of these tax hikes, and sadly, I am a
casualty of that carnage. I really don't have the right
words to describe how sad this makes me. But I
(02:20):
don't even have time to mourn because with my wife
also newly unemployed, we are scrambling to get our resumes
out there as fast as we can. Now. My specialty
for the past decade has been process automation and process
improvement using what's called robotic process automation or RPA. But
the truth is I just like making people's jobs easier
with automation and computing. This show's not going to become
(02:43):
about my employment challenges, but it would be irresponsible to
my family to not at least say that I'm looking
for work now, and if you have any leads of
that sort, I would be happy to send you my resume.
Normally I would say send them to me my Monster
Talk email address, but let's just skip that because that
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if you have an opening or think you need someone
(03:03):
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you doctor Atlantis at gmail dot com. That's fully spelled
out doc t O r at L E. N Tis
at gmail dot com. That's my personal email address. And
I know this is a long shot. Anyway, the kind
of work I do is not well known to most people,
but I'm really good at it and I enjoy it immensely,
and I like fixing stuff and making people's lives easier.
(03:25):
So I hope that I can continue to work in
that space. In the meantime, I've got a few weeks
before the panic really hits, and I'm going to put
some of my decade long research.
Speaker 3 (03:35):
Into innovation into something tangible.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
I don't know how this will work out exactly, but
I've started a new feed on Patreon where I'm going
to release some of my writing and thoughts on my
innovation work.
Speaker 3 (03:44):
It's not live yet, but it will be this week.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
That's going to be located at patreon dot com Forward
Slash the Invention Fallacy. That's not going to be a podcast,
although I may post some interviews there in the future.
It's a good old fashioned blog of chapter material, and
I think it'll be a useful step into turning my
work into a complete book and not just a bunch
of notes and thoughts. So one more thing here, I'm
not trying to make anybody sad. My family's challenges are
(04:09):
far from unique. We're just having a lot of them
all at once, and even my pathological optimism is being
stretched a little thin. But if you like this show
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(04:30):
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forward slash Monster Talk all one word. Okay, that's enough
begging for a miracle. Let's get to some good old
fashioned monstrutal. It's actually quite unlike anything we've ever seen before.
(04:57):
A giant, hairy creature part ap.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
In Luckness, a twenty four mile long bottomless lake in
the highlands of Scotland, get a creature known as the
Luckness Monster. Monster Talk.
Speaker 3 (05:33):
Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters. I'm
Blake Smith.
Speaker 4 (05:38):
And I'm Karen Stolsner.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
This week, you may be wondering how we can justify
an episode about magpies on a show about monsters, and
these aren't even proper European magpies. They're Australian and they're
not even corvids. But they fall into our monster adjacent
content because they're the victims of that most powerful of
all human inventions, scary stories. Now you might think bombs
(06:01):
or guns are our most deadly creations, but I would
seriously argue their stories are far more dangerous. You can't
kill stories, and they are often the motivation behind tragedy
and horror, witch trials, pigrams, wars, mobs. They're always started
by stories. Stories can turn a harmless immigrant into a
(06:22):
vicious criminal in the minds of a public unequipped to
evaluate such claims, and we hope that the methods of
inquiry that we talk about on this show help individuals
think about such matters critically, because it's simply impossible to
stop the spread of stories, and the best hope I've
been able to come up with is teaching people to
ask whether such claims are true and how to evaluate
(06:43):
them on one's own, which brings us to our topic.
The Australian magpie, a bird much maligned by folk wisdom
and story, and there's other reasons I think today's interviews
within our bailiwick, but we'll discuss those explicitly during the interview.
I have too many intellectual interests, but the fact that
your listening suggests you probably do too. I used to
(07:06):
watch BBC documentaries every Sunday night on PBS, and David
Attenborough was like my kind biology teacher who never gave homework.
Now there's a lot of myths about these birds, so
let's go find out what's real, what's made up, and
whether bigfoot hunting could qualify as citizen science. MORBs Trutle
(07:26):
welcome Grania Cleary to Monster Talk. Would you mind introducing
yourself to our listeners and telling us a little bit
about who you are and what your relationship is with birds?
Speaker 1 (07:37):
Okay, my name's Grona Cleary.
Speaker 5 (07:40):
I am come from Ireland still, even though I'm now
an Australian citizen. I moved over to Australia into thansand
and seven with my husband. I got my PhD in
badger ecology in Ireland and moved to the one continent
that doesn't have five.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
Years, Australia.
Speaker 5 (07:55):
And once I was here, I still worked with mammals
in universe. You have New South Wales Sydney University. But
the birds always kind of caught my eye. It's factually
because like Australia had such fantastic birds. I mean, if
you want to study birds, if you want to see birds,
come to Australia. Go to Africa for your big game, Australia.
Speaker 1 (08:14):
For your birds.
Speaker 5 (08:15):
So I'm over here doing field work on rodents, on rats,
and I just noticed the birds all the time. You know,
they just you just can't help pronounce them. So that
really sparked my interest. And I came out of academia
and worked for not for profit organization and I was
doing citizens science, so engaging the public in what's going
on in their back garden, and I did it with birds,
(08:36):
and I was looking at the use of water in
the backyard and what birds were visiting, and what was
the different species and how often would they stay for
and the passion that people had for their birds, and
the questions they came back and after me and the
pictures they would show me. I Oh, the envy I
would get and like that really united it because I wanted,
(08:56):
you know, I wanted to know more, and you know,
they wanted to tell me the big question that always
came back to was can I feed my birds? Because
in Australia that the hard line don't feed birds, and
that's not good enough because we have been feeding birds since.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
Before the farming.
Speaker 5 (09:12):
Revolution, like before the agricultural revolution. We have engaged in birds.
People are going to do it. It's in our DNA,
so we need to do it properly. And that was
kind of the start of my journey with birds, where
like people are going to interact with birds and are
going to feed birds regardless of you know what bird
life says.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
You're always going to get people who are going to
do it.
Speaker 5 (09:30):
So let's give them the skills, which is what they
came to me asking for, so we can do this properly.
So you know, don't feed the magpie min's meat, you know,
look at feeding the meal worms. You know, don't feed
them every time they fix, and you just need little
guidelines to help them engage with the birds more healthy.
Speaker 4 (09:46):
Wow, that's such a fantastic story.
Speaker 6 (09:48):
I just love how you came to studying birds and
everything that you've done.
Speaker 4 (09:52):
And as you can hear, I grew up in Australia.
Speaker 6 (09:55):
And I really miss our unique birds, iconic birds, Rosella's
and Koka.
Speaker 4 (10:01):
Bars and Laura keats and of course magpies.
Speaker 6 (10:03):
And so the reason I found you and tracked you
down was that when I was about eight years old,
I was walking with my mother and we were somewhere
in Sydney and a magpie swooped at us and attacked
my mother and we had to go and see an ophthalmologist,
and she had some eye issues for a while. And
(10:24):
it was just quite recently, so maybe a couple of
months ago, that I was going for a walk myself
and I was swooped by one of our local birds,
a blackbird now I think as a red winged blackbird,
and it reminded me of what happened when I was
a kid, and I mean throughout my life growing up there.
I lived in rural parts of Australia too, and going
(10:46):
and putting washing on the line as you do in Australia,
not so much here in the States, but certainly there
you get attacked by magpies who you swoop. And so
I thought, I want to talk to someone about magpies
because there's such interesting birds. We've got a lot of
questions to ask you, But could we start with talking
a bit about what exactly in Australian magpie is and
(11:07):
are they really magpies?
Speaker 5 (11:10):
Okay, so they come from a songbird first of all,
like a lot of our birds are. So we compare
them to the European magpie. The European magpie is also
black and white like the Australian magpie. Now, when the
first settlers, all the Europeans, came over to Australia in
the seventeenth century, they saw the magpie. They what wasn't
(11:32):
you didn't even have a name. The Aboriginals had their
own name for it. I was based more on the
song I believe, but they they immediately said, oh, sure,
it looks like the magpie back home, we call it
the magpie. But it's actually more it belongs to a
different family. It's not a Covid. Now, Covid is what
the European magpie belongs. It belongs to, and a lot
of the other magpies, I think also in America belonged
(11:53):
to the Corvid family. The Australian magpie was just called
that because it looks like in European magpie.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
So we have the.
Speaker 5 (12:00):
Magpie lark here, which is a corpd and it's called
a magpie log because it looks like a smaller magpie.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
They really had no imagination those first settlers.
Speaker 5 (12:10):
It looks like a magpie that looks like a smaller magpie.
So that's not called that a magpie lark more based
on that black and white coloring than anything else.
Speaker 1 (12:18):
Is by god it's name, but.
Speaker 5 (12:20):
It's actually more While I say, both of the songbirds,
corvids aren't known to sing, but the Australian magpie is
a well known singer. As you know, it is the
sound of Australia and it's just you.
Speaker 1 (12:32):
You can't help but listen to it.
Speaker 5 (12:35):
And they're also known as the policeman of the bush
because when you're out in the bush, it's always the
magpie watching you. You know, will be silent, but it
will be there watching you as you walk around.
Speaker 1 (12:44):
So they're just fabulous birds.
Speaker 2 (12:47):
Well you know, crows don't sing, but they have just cause.
So these birds, they're black and white. I have only
seen one picture of them in preparing for the show,
but I've seen the European magpies. Now there's similarities. I
(13:08):
assume is this due to conversion evolution, and does that
conversion evolution also include like a higher cognitive capacity, and
I imagine that's not even related to the coloring. But
I'm just wondering, are they smart light magpies and are
they colored for similar reasons or do we know?
Speaker 1 (13:24):
You know, yes and yes.
Speaker 5 (13:27):
So if you think about the urban environment, birds of
certain colors do very well, and colors such as black
and white or boat colors that are produced by the.
Speaker 1 (13:38):
Melonin in the skin, So it means that the feather.
Speaker 5 (13:41):
Structure is very robust, it can deal with wear and
tear so and it also gives good camouflage. It's effective
camouflage in dappled light or contrasting surfaces, so that black
and white is a good adaption and it's good for
urban areas because of the traps, including the wear and
tear on the feathers.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
So if you think.
Speaker 5 (14:03):
About European magpie, he is black and white, but eat
his tail and even some of its dark and feathers
have iridescence in it of olives and kind of all
of these greens and purples. The Australian magpie not so much.
It's much more just the two colors, and for the.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
Conversion evolution it's more so conversion evolution Just for those
who might be too sure.
Speaker 5 (14:24):
It's a process where unrelated species evolve similar traits independently,
and it's often due to adaptions to similar environments or
ecological natures, so such as the urban environment. Like the
two types of magpies. Also think about wings on bats,
in sects, birds, they all develop the type of wing
to fly, So that's conversion evolution.
Speaker 1 (14:44):
So the adaption to urban.
Speaker 5 (14:45):
Areas with the smartness as you mentioned, Yes, magpies are
very very smart, and as are the core fits the
European magpie. And this intelligence seems to go hand in
hand with being able to live and do well in
urban area.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
Yes, because this is not your natural habitat.
Speaker 5 (15:02):
We are cutting down trees, we are building houses, we
are playing you know fully rugby on the oval. When
they want to be foraging, they have to adapt to us.
So you constantly have to be tinking about what's the
bloody human going to do now, also while looking at
other birds and having to adapt to their surroundings, and
that drives intelligence.
Speaker 1 (15:21):
That's cognitive flexibility. It's exactly how.
Speaker 5 (15:24):
You're told, you know, don't get stuck in unproductive patron thoughts.
You know, change your thinking to adapt your circumstances. Highly
cognitive birds do this, your ravens, your pros, your magpies,
your parents, your cockatoos. They are our top intelligent birds
on that pyramid if you wanted to imagine, just as
we are the top of our primates. And then you
(15:46):
kind of look at gorillas and orangutans and that I
think you mean pyramid.
Speaker 2 (15:55):
Sorry, I can see how this is going to go.
Speaker 4 (16:02):
We've got a.
Speaker 6 (16:02):
Bunch of questions, but you've just touched upon something that
I'd like you to expand on a little bit. And
that's just how incredibly smart magpies are. So they're not
bird brains, but I've heard that they can actually recognize people.
Speaker 4 (16:15):
Is that true? And how much can they recognize people?
To what extent?
Speaker 5 (16:19):
So this is great work coming out of Western Australia
on the magpie populations over there in urban areas. And
one of the things that looked at is audio memory.
So audio memory is identifying somebody by remembering what that
voice sounds like. So you know, we the three of us,
all are very distinct voices and it's our spectral temporal
(16:40):
envelope that this defines that voice like, you know the
rhythm of my rhythm being a bit faster. You know
him from Georgia, a bit of a slow talker. You
know how all these things change. Birds are the same,
so they can identify. Magpies can identify each other by
their call. So they'll hear a colum they'll say, oh, yeah,
the vocal signature in that call relates.
Speaker 1 (17:04):
To you know, Jimmy over there, who I met this morning.
Speaker 5 (17:06):
So they had so they have it does them well
remember who was calling.
Speaker 1 (17:10):
And it's the same with people.
Speaker 5 (17:12):
So this study in w A looked at people who
provided food for magpies to people who the magpies never
had experience with, and they sure enough, the magpies were
quick to learn the voices the call of those people
who had fed them food.
Speaker 1 (17:25):
So they we could remember.
Speaker 5 (17:27):
Distinct voices depending on their experience with those people. You know,
it does a bird weld remember who's feeding them, because
you know, food can be a limited resource and it
can really you know again again aids five in the
urban area, so they definitely remember.
Speaker 1 (17:40):
You can recognize voices, and it's the same with faces.
Speaker 5 (17:44):
Although there hasn't really been good studies done on magpies
and Pacific. We have seen it in corporates, especially crows
where and ravens where they'll remember an experimenter who wears
a nasty mask and interacts badly with the with the
ravens and then comes back where the different masks. The
bird responds differently with the nasty masks. They see it
(18:04):
as a threatening you know, this was the individual that
hurt me, so you know it will it will kind
of display threatening behaviors. While when the experimental wore a
neutral mask, the ravens didn't recognized you know, the ravens
looked at face and didn't recognize the you know, the mask,
so didn't attack it.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
So there are we have seen it in.
Speaker 5 (18:22):
Other birds that they can so I do believe that
the magpie will be able to do this. And you
have so many citizens scientists talking about that magpies recognizing
even the sound of the car when they're coming home
from work.
Speaker 4 (18:33):
Fascinating.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
You know you mentioned citizens scientists. This comes up a lot.
You know, our show is monster Talk, and a lot
of our I guess the people in the field of
crypt's wology. You know, we're a skeptical show, but a
lot of people like to go out and look for bigfoot,
and you know, and they think they're doing research, and
maybe they are to an extent, but you know, most
of them aren't trained in how to keep logs, you know,
(18:56):
and actually pay attention to the times and the situation
and what they're seeing. And there's so much data that
you can collect that kind of gives you an indications
of why wildlife's behaving certain ways, and if you sort
of share that data, it becomes useful for drawing conclusions.
(19:16):
Are seeing correlations anyway, right, And so I take it
that birders are a little bit like amateur astronomers, that
the level of the citizens' science is a little stronger
than maybe coming out of what's in Bigfoot.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
I love, I know, I love, I love love that question.
Speaker 5 (19:34):
So with the citizens science, so like the experiments I've run,
it would be based around the bird bat in people's
back gardens, So they would be told to monitor once
a day for twenty minutes and record the number of
species a visit.
Speaker 1 (19:48):
So that twenty.
Speaker 5 (19:49):
Minute window, it means that I can compare your data
to someone else who also conducted the study for twenty
minutes on their bird bat, their comparable studies. So something
like going out to track bigfoot. If they did transact
lines and they did it, maybe not at the same
time each day, because it's bigfoot in a certain area,
and if you go randomly, maybe you're just going to
(20:10):
miss them and only seeing one out of ten times.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
But if you actually did it at it more, you know,
if you.
Speaker 5 (20:15):
Taught about it more critically and thought, okay, if I
checked this area at this time for you know, such
a period of time and then change the time to
see you know, you kind of have to think about
like that instead of just doing it randomly and then
you see them.
Speaker 1 (20:25):
But there's no trant, do you get me?
Speaker 2 (20:29):
Yeah, finding trends over times, youation, weather, all that stuff.
Speaker 1 (20:33):
Yeah, absolutely, exactly, exactly.
Speaker 6 (20:37):
Well, if I may, I'll get to the crux of
why I wanted to talk about magpies, and that is
why do they swoop at people? And are they just
being mean or is there a particular reason for it,
or is it something that both males and females do
or just one of the sexes or tell us all
(20:57):
about the swooping.
Speaker 5 (21:00):
So, first of all, I am speaking on the side
of the magpie.
Speaker 1 (21:04):
I represent the Australian magpies.
Speaker 5 (21:06):
And they are being unfairly portrayed in the media, such
as your open comments about them swooping from the air.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
Americans from coming.
Speaker 7 (21:16):
Over here, don't take the magpies are coming out of
the sky to kill them and take the babies. Swooping
behavior is something a lot of birds do, especially birds
that live in groups. So you might remember noisy miners,
those honey eaters, that brown birds or gray birds with
the yellow eye.
Speaker 5 (21:34):
They're very prolific and they hang out in little mobs
and they'll swoop you. And so swooping isn't is a
mechanism birds use to deter other birds or deter predator.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
So you might sometimes see on Facebook, like a fox
or a cat getting.
Speaker 5 (21:49):
Harassed by birds. The birds are following them. That's that
swooping behavior talking about. So it's something that's present.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
In nearly all birds. It's just a bit behavior response
to a treat.
Speaker 5 (22:00):
Now, we talked about how your magpies are living in
urban areas, and there are a lot of trats in
urban areas. So you're dealing with cats, you're dealing with dogs,
you're dealing with foxes, you're dealing with people, and you're
dealing with other magpies trying to.
Speaker 1 (22:13):
Get your tree.
Speaker 5 (22:14):
We're under the assumption that all magpipes get to set
up home every spring.
Speaker 1 (22:18):
That's not true. The cream of the crop gets the nest.
Speaker 5 (22:22):
A lot of magpies don't get to secure a tree
because then you know, they're not territorial territorially strong enough,
or they can't you know, they can't defend the tree,
or they can't drive off another magpie to gain their tree.
So you'll have individuals that will nest every year and
they'll use the same tree, and they've got to defend
this tree every single year. During breeding season, which is
(22:43):
when we see a lot of the swooping, it will
often be the male and the female is on the
nest with chicks or with eggs.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
So it's a.
Speaker 5 (22:51):
Highly vulntable time when when the risk of these eggs
or these chicks dying is very high. That father is
having to look after the chicks. He's got to look
after his missus. He's got a defend from the cats,
he's got the fan from the foxes, he's got a
defend from other magpies coming in trying to run his
missus off.
Speaker 1 (23:06):
He's got a defend from you walking down the street
not noticing him.
Speaker 5 (23:09):
He gave you a warn He was like, hello, and
you see me, and you acknowledge me.
Speaker 1 (23:13):
You and your man were chatting away to each other.
Speaker 5 (23:16):
What if you guys had stopped and acknowledged or looked
at the magpie, you know, it would know that you
saw and it was kind of that that magpie is
smart enough to know that you're not going to threaten it.
So that's one of the messages we're trying to send
people is throughout the year, make friends with your magpie.
And again, something like less than ten percent do this,
(23:37):
and it is something that happens, you know, in a
highly urban area and most of the time, you know,
if you're talking to the magpie during the year and
it gets to know you, especially if you're doing a
walk and you're walking past the same individuals.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
They do get to know you, and they won't see
you as a treat.
Speaker 5 (23:51):
This swooping is very much because that magpie is like
feeling very threatened by you and he just wants to
protect his baby and his missus.
Speaker 1 (24:00):
Things your fault, you know right there, You know.
Speaker 6 (24:06):
That makes that makes sense. That's thank you for that inside.
That really does make sense.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
I was thinking, So the birds that don't get a tree,
do they are these? I mean, that's that sounds like
a pretty small percentage you're making it. Or do the
others find somewhere else or or are they I don't know,
n cells.
Speaker 5 (24:26):
So so what usually happens is that hang out in
a bachelor flock and they'll just try each year. They
will sometimes when you have a pair, they'll try a
different tree. But if the nest is lost, like if
there's a bad storm and the last get blown out
of the tree, they won't tend to try again in
(24:46):
that area.
Speaker 1 (24:47):
They'll try and look for another tree.
Speaker 5 (24:49):
So you will have individuals who will just try but
won't succeed, or you know, they use the wrong material,
will have a lot of rain and the nests will
get waterlogged. So there's all these things that you got
to consider from the back point of view. Location, location, location,
and once you find that tray, you defended.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
And if you've got to swoop.
Speaker 7 (25:06):
That little girl with pigtails, by god, it raggs, you.
Speaker 5 (25:12):
Know, but it is it is about sharing our space
and understanding it from the bird's point of view.
Speaker 6 (25:17):
Yeah, sure, that's why we, Yeah, we wanted to bring
you on into set the record straight.
Speaker 2 (25:23):
Poor bachelor flocks, all of them having a place to stay,
having to shop at Megpika.
Speaker 5 (25:33):
It's going to try to drive out Bruce from that
big gum trade.
Speaker 1 (25:36):
My god, is he?
Speaker 5 (25:37):
So?
Speaker 1 (25:37):
Yeah, Bruce is very wild up this season. And the
other thing is to be like leave the bird alone.
Just take a different route.
Speaker 5 (25:43):
You know, we are route as they say over here,
you know, just just give them the bird space. It
only happens for a very short period, and again it's
very unlikely to happen. I'll tell you my story about
being swooped by a magpie I live with. I have
I keep and I live with them because it's like
I do live with them to glass. So glass are
type of coppertoo over here that the ones with the
beauty I think you call them pink and gray cockatoos.
(26:07):
That got the beautiful pink and the gray bats. So
we have them on little harnesses and we walk them
around our local park. And there was this female, yeah,
and there was this female magpie and she was feeding
away on the grass and she saw us coming and
she swooped me. And that swoop was very much this
is my area. I'm feeding here.
Speaker 1 (26:26):
You and your.
Speaker 5 (26:26):
Glass move on because glass will forage in simple in
similar areas. So the magpie and you know it wasn't
me stupid, he was telling me move on, keep walking.
Speaker 8 (26:36):
Love.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
Yeah, Well do they really do they steal shiny things?
Or is that just a myth?
Speaker 1 (26:45):
Okay?
Speaker 5 (26:46):
So this again is admit and it's related to the
European magpie. And where this myth came from was in
the eighteen fifties, a French play was written and the
French play was about this servant girl who was about
to face the gallows because her master accused her of
stealing his silverware, only for the last minute for it
(27:09):
to be found out that it was actually the local
magpie that became a famous plane was turned into an
opera that was highly successful in the late eighteenth century,
kind of around that time, and.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
That started the myth.
Speaker 5 (27:22):
And because ravens across magpies corvids are very intelligent, they're inquisitive.
They look at things and go what's that. So they
are known to kind of you know and you know,
investigate objects, but they don't actually collect them. They don't
keep them in the nest for the shiny treasures that
that that's very very much omit gotcha?
Speaker 2 (27:43):
Is it the Oh my gosh, there is a bird
down there that does collect and build these elaborate Yeah.
Speaker 4 (27:50):
Well that's a power blue thing, that's right. Yeah, and that.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
Does that far.
Speaker 5 (27:58):
So originally that would have been it's like feathers and flowers,
it would have gathered and it's to do.
Speaker 1 (28:03):
With attracting the female.
Speaker 5 (28:05):
So that's part of its kind of you know, to
attract the mating female. And now with European settlement and
all that and all rubbish, that's sudden to collect plastic
blue plastic objects as well. But it's used for the
same same message as the feathers and the flowers, which
is to try to attract the female.
Speaker 6 (28:23):
Interesting, well, I want to ask a couple of biological
questions too, just about their diet, what do they eat,
and how long do they live? And it seems like
they do pair up.
Speaker 1 (28:35):
It's not good for and the thing is the female.
So we we from our research is needing.
Speaker 5 (28:40):
Us to believe a lot of the groups here are
dominated by the females. So don't us can have an
easier time by kind of hanging around in the flock
in that you know area, so I'll hold the territory.
And within the territory, you'll usually have one dominant male.
He'll have a white back sometimes too, and you'll have
females and juveniles.
Speaker 1 (28:59):
The females are you she won from the.
Speaker 5 (29:01):
Previous year that's allowed to stay, or they sometimes can
be in, you know, ones that come in as well
to try to mate with the male.
Speaker 1 (29:08):
But it's usually just.
Speaker 5 (29:09):
A dominant female that will achieve the mating and the
female will actually suppress the other females for mating. So
that's a dominant male and dominant female and they'll hold
the territory throughout the year. And the carling we hear
is very much their group song, and it's their song
to define their territory, to mark that territory into show
group cohesion, which means we are a group and we
(29:30):
will work together and defend this territory together. Now, to
a listening bachelor group, they're like, oh, well, jeez, they're
gonna not gonna mats with them.
Speaker 1 (29:38):
You know that there's too many of them, and you
know they're.
Speaker 5 (29:40):
Very much gonna work together, and we think it still
has to be proven, but I will put my money
on it that there's vocal signatures in the songs, which
means the group can be recognized by other groups as
being Oh, look it's the O'Brien's the singer. They're up
early today and in the group.
Speaker 1 (29:58):
Actually in the field.
Speaker 5 (30:00):
Vitual birds, individual birds have their own voice that are
recognized by others.
Speaker 1 (30:05):
This is vocal signatures.
Speaker 5 (30:06):
It's still there's still controversy around it, but it makes sense.
This song is so important to them. It functions for
so many different reasons. And the warbling we hear, it's
actually remember that warbling you love and the magpie Yeah, I.
Speaker 2 (30:37):
Tell you another bad motivator.
Speaker 1 (30:38):
Look, that's a form of vocal practice.
Speaker 5 (30:42):
So songbirds not just magpipes, but songbirds learn that vocalization
the same way babies learn to speak.
Speaker 1 (30:49):
They listen to that caregivers.
Speaker 5 (30:51):
They spend the time just memorizing the tone, the sound
of the voice and slowly dada, the spectral temple of
the words over you know, two years is narrowed down
to when the baby dn't think can actually speak. Songbirds
do the same, but they also have to practice. If
you don't practice your language, you lose it. And magpies,
(31:12):
like most songbirds will practice that song and in Australian
magpies is the warbling song and that's them actually practicing
and they are fairly happy they do it, you know,
happily it gives them a dolphin and dolphin hits like
you know we also when we sing.
Speaker 6 (31:27):
Well, I've heard about sinsitive periods in birds. There's a
lot of theory about that, or critical periods, first language acquisition,
that's my area. But so talking about birds, I hear
a lot of birds, songbirds and magpies.
Speaker 4 (31:42):
Do you have that sensitive period? And if they miss
that window, they.
Speaker 5 (31:45):
Never learn how to sing the exactly And I have
a book coming out called Why Do Birds Singing? Coming
out September the second, and that's all about that that
critical learning period. Yeah, so things like ches and zebra inches,
it has studied and we can say it's I can't
do like it's two weeks after since hatching. And if
you have a bird and it's not exposed to song,
(32:07):
you know, if it's not exposed to the vocal recording
or an infacial bird being there, it won't learn that
its song. And after that critical period it can be
very difficult. It can reopen.
Speaker 1 (32:17):
But you know, if the bird doesn't get exposed to
song as a nestling and never really learns it no incredible.
Speaker 2 (32:24):
I know Karen's field is linguistics. For me, this comes
down It makes me think on information theory, like you
know what information is being conveyed? You know how much
did it is signal? How much of this noise? What
can they accomplish with these songs? I mean, I suspect
everybody knows most animal vocalization is about mating, But what else?
(32:45):
What else did they do it? Do they? Is it?
They else? Food? I know crows do a lot of things,
but that's quite different, I guess.
Speaker 1 (32:52):
So yeah, I love this question.
Speaker 5 (32:54):
We have the song, which is as you said, for
mark and territory attracting mate. There two big messages and
it can also be used for group coersion and for
keeping a pair of birds together. You know, they sing
and they feel reunited, but they also have calls, and
calls are the private conversations they have with each other.
(33:15):
So it's not loud, it's not far another bird and
you know, a foreign bird to listen to with forrest
partner to listen to or forrest nestlings to listen to
and those calls can give a variety of information depending
on how the bird is feeling.
Speaker 1 (33:29):
And again this has.
Speaker 5 (33:30):
Been done a lot with you know, experiments done on
the sebra finches where they have looked at you know,
when the bird is hungry that will be louder, or
when it's happy and content and you know it will
be kind of softer.
Speaker 1 (33:42):
So again that goes back to that spectral temple.
Speaker 5 (33:45):
The tone, the volume of the call will signify how
the bird is feeling. They'll also do mobbing calls, so
in the Australian magpie, the Australian magpie can actually do
use different calls depending on whatnot is seen an ego too,
seeing a raptile on the ground like a lace monitor
and other birds have learned to listen for the difference
(34:05):
in these two different alarm calls and will look up
when it does the eagle call and will look look.
Speaker 1 (34:12):
Down when it does the guana or the lizard call.
Speaker 5 (34:15):
So there are differences in the call that give out
information about different predators. And that's only the touch of
the ice boat birds. Yeah, yeah, it's a very and
other birds learning it. And but back to the magpies,
and the magpies will will point at the guana or
point up at the eagle, and other magpies will join
(34:36):
it and also point so it doesn't when it sees
the predator, it does doesn't just flee like a chicken
wood or a smaller prey bird. It will actually go
and say, okay, this is an eagle. If I, you know,
call for this, get me mates around.
Speaker 1 (34:49):
We point to it. We say we see you, We
see you. When your back off, we see you.
Speaker 9 (34:53):
Go on.
Speaker 1 (34:56):
Wi the predator. Because the predator has been caught, they've
all seen it.
Speaker 5 (35:01):
So yeah, the location and yeah, there's so many clever
experiments to try to determine what the birds is seen.
Speaker 1 (35:09):
Yeah, so it looks like they do, and they.
Speaker 5 (35:10):
Can combine calls the even sand defy messages, you know,
such as the guana first.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
It's the eagle call. Yeah. I could go on, I
could go on, but stop myself.
Speaker 4 (35:21):
Oh no, it's amazing.
Speaker 6 (35:23):
I've read studies about a Vervet monkeys and Diana monkeys
and how it's gotten to the point where sometimes birds
can recognize the monkeys calls and monkeys can recognize the
birds calls. It's really amazing.
Speaker 1 (35:35):
Yeah, it's eavesdropping.
Speaker 6 (35:37):
Yeah, well, I think we could talk about magpies all day,
you know so much. This is just so so much fun.
But we should start to wind up soon. And some
of the final questions we have, I guess we'd like
to learn a bit more about how to deal with
magpies then how to live with magpies. If we have
one in our yard, should we be feeding it or
(36:00):
avoiding it or something else has should we live with them?
Speaker 5 (36:05):
So my big message is embrace what comes into your
back garden. Your back garden can provide great habitat for
our urban wildlife, So never underestimate what your little pocket
of land can do. And if you do have birds
in your back garden, provide water. Think about keeping a
bird bat And it doesn't have to be anything fancy,
(36:25):
even an old pot that you just put on top
of a table. The birds will thank you for it.
Give them time to find it, don't expect, you know,
a beautiful diversity of birds the next day. You know
they will find it. And once they find it, they
will continue to use it. And don't discriminate. Don't be
a bird racist. Don't just want to fancy. Once your
pigeon needs love as well. Your local prone needs love
(36:48):
as well. These are birds that are living with you
in a harsh, brutal world, you know, so do embrace them.
And feeding does provide a lot of joy for people.
Just please don't feed bread. Be cautious of what your
feeding them. You know, think about the bird and what
the birds need in terms of habitat and nesting areas
are always welcome, either in the form of nest boxes
(37:10):
or even different shrubs at different sizes.
Speaker 1 (37:12):
Think about different structures.
Speaker 5 (37:14):
Of vegetation in your back garden where different birds can hide,
and you have smaller birds, Put a bird back close
to the bushes and put a rock in the center
of it so small birds don't feel as exposed and
they can just jump up and down onto the rock
and then into the habitat, into the vegetation. Because a
wet bird can be you know, he can be fluntable
to a predator. So smaller birds like to bathe and
(37:35):
then go and hide very quickly.
Speaker 1 (37:36):
So think about that.
Speaker 5 (37:37):
Think about the birds in your area, think about what
you think they would need.
Speaker 1 (37:41):
You know, go to your local council.
Speaker 5 (37:43):
That's information out there and you'll be so rewarded because
it really does bring life into your garden and those
birds rely on you, and it's the type of connection
you can make with a wild species that's really.
Speaker 1 (37:53):
Beautiful, especially in this you know, this in this time when.
Speaker 5 (37:57):
The world seems the on the edge of destruction, and
so you know, em raise your birds.
Speaker 4 (38:02):
You know, that's wonderful advice.
Speaker 2 (38:05):
Yeah, I've got one more bird question before we close
down this. I'm going to preface it with this really
short story. I'm not a bird, but I have recently
gotten really interested in mocking birds, and they have this
behavior called flashing, so they raise their wings almost like
their own ratchets, and and biology that there's not one
(38:26):
hundred percent certainty for why they do this, but there's
some belief that maybe it has to do with feeding behavior,
like it somehow does something to make insects, you know,
more available. And so once I found out it was
a mystery, I started thinking about all these experiments to
try to like help, you know, kind of narrow that down,
because what I'm really curious about is how do insects
(38:48):
perceive the flashing, What does it do to them to
make this a good, you know, eating behavior.
Speaker 1 (38:54):
I love that question.
Speaker 5 (38:55):
Over here we have really wagtails again European wally wagtail.
Speaker 1 (39:00):
Yeah, so he has.
Speaker 5 (39:01):
There's they'll work together and they'll move on horses and cattle,
and as the cattle walk, the insects will move up
from the grass from the soil to a ford being
trampled on. The magpies will then go, you know, to
with the hoofs of the cattle is and start taking
these little magpies as the cattle move. So that's that's
(39:22):
what they're doing with the flashing. What that can be
on a dull day, So a dull day when the
clouds are moving, this doesn't work. On a bright, hot day,
the insects will perceive the magpie shadow of what it is,
a predator. But on very overcast days, when the light
is staffled anyway, the mag the wagtail can use its
tail to flush out by using shadow to scare the
(39:44):
magi to scare the insects up and really.
Speaker 2 (39:47):
Need but you see that there's a dark and light band.
Speaker 1 (39:52):
It's really exactly.
Speaker 2 (39:54):
But the actual question I have was are there any
sort of similar mysteries about mag pies out there or
are there things people should be looking for or wondering
about when they see these birds that are still a
hot topic in ornithology. I think the kids are going it.
Speaker 1 (40:11):
Probably at the moment.
Speaker 5 (40:12):
It is around their focal vocalization. When you're in different
areas do the bird? Does the magpipe calls sound slightly different?
So all the changes depending on where you know accents
for the want of a better word, do different magpipes
have slightly different calls and different areas?
Speaker 1 (40:30):
You can it be a good one?
Speaker 5 (40:31):
Do you othertain though it's a little bit more depressing
is with climate change and our summer's getting hotter, there
seems to be a cognitive point where they'll stop interacting.
They'll stop marking territories because they have to keep themselves cool,
So they spend a lot of time just showing you
know that gaping the wings, plays the feathers you're drooping,
(40:52):
and they won't actually engage in things like foraging, marking territory, grooming, interacting.
Speaker 1 (40:57):
With each other.
Speaker 5 (40:58):
So the thing so there are yeah, there's a lot
for the citizen scientists to watch out with. And you
guys have the Cornwell Aunitology labs over there. They do
some great work, so it hit them up as well,
and think about getting involved in citizen science projects around
birds banks.
Speaker 4 (41:12):
Yeah, some so much food for thought.
Speaker 6 (41:14):
And thank you again for all of your insight into
these wonderful birds. And you've really give me a different
perspective on them growing up with them as I did.
But we've got one final question for you, which we
ask all of our guests a signature question. What's your
favorite monster?
Speaker 5 (41:31):
I love this, I love it so my one and
this is a real one. This one would have to
be the banchee. So yeah, the banshee is an old
of course, with all of these, that's different, you know,
stories told. But the story I grew up with was
an old woman who with long, long hair, and just
before someone was going to die in your family, three days,
(41:54):
three nights before they were going to die, she'd perch
on your roof and she'd comba long hair, and she'd
weigh and she'd have red eyes from crying so much.
And when I'd go out, like when i'd be out
the next day as a kid, and I'd find a
comb on the ground, it'd be like, oh God, the
benchi was in the AIRA was going to die. And
she particularly targeted people with oh and mac in the
(42:18):
name because they're very ancient Irish names. So she wasn't
so much interested in these newcomers like the FitzGeralds, you know,
more rage than the Irish themselves. They had no booker
off your Normandy and you never got English in your blood.
She was after the old, old Orish, so those would
oh Sullivan, Macmarrow, MacDonald where her real targets. So I
had two friends, and old Sullivan and a Macmarrow. And
(42:40):
as children I used to tormentum, have you heard the Banshee?
You know you're going to hear the benchie when your
mammy died, because you're an old Sullivan, she'd be sitting
there on your garage pushing along.
Speaker 1 (42:49):
Oh my god, tormented them.
Speaker 5 (42:53):
I know.
Speaker 2 (42:54):
We've talked a lot about ghosts, and some of them
seem like they're suffering, but the Banchees are always doing whale.
Speaker 1 (43:00):
Yeah you that someone's going to die? Yeah, stop frightened.
Speaker 6 (43:07):
I think in all the years we've been doing this,
that's the first time that we've had that answer to
the Banchies.
Speaker 4 (43:12):
I believe so perfect, absolutely perfect. Given you a heritage, Really,
that's the profle banche come up.
Speaker 2 (43:18):
Yeah, no, no, Well, we've talked about Banshee's before, but
it's never been someone's favorite.
Speaker 4 (43:22):
Monster favorite yeah until yeah.
Speaker 9 (43:25):
A quick insert here. Technically, Chris Woodard did mention the
Banshee in her interview about Women in Black, but did
not explicitly say it was her favorite, merely that she's
partial to it. I know this because of the incredibly
helpful work that listener Joseph Scales has done to catalog
all of this favorite monster data. I have failed to
make his work public because I was struggling to get
(43:46):
it into a format that would show up in a
useful way on our website. But I finally got a
notion of how to make it accessible and hopefully visually useful.
So that's something I'll be working on. Maybe I'll be
able to knock get out soon. We'll see. But I
want to thank Joseph for what I find to be
an incredibly helpful reference source.
Speaker 2 (44:05):
Ah.
Speaker 5 (44:05):
Yeah, Well, the other one I would have picked been
ourriichh and I did my A lot of my education
in Scotland would have caused been lock netting, the locknet monster.
Speaker 1 (44:12):
But the one she got me, the one that you
know as the kids, the one that I have see
the code, I'll be like, oh Jesus.
Speaker 4 (44:18):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, they stick with you for sure. This
is delightful.
Speaker 2 (44:25):
Yeah, it's been a real treat. And you're so enthusiastic
about science and we love that.
Speaker 4 (44:29):
Oh yeah, it makes us feel passionate to an enthusiastic
thank you.
Speaker 1 (44:33):
Oh that's so good. That's so so good. I'm so pleased.
Speaker 4 (44:37):
Where can people find you and find your books and
your website.
Speaker 1 (44:41):
I have two books out at the moment. You can
get them on Amazon.
Speaker 5 (44:45):
It's the first one was Your Backyard Birds, and that
was my first book, and that was kind of like,
you know, you just kind of put it out and
see what happens, like the first Pancake.
Speaker 8 (44:53):
But the second book, oh, the second book that was
the best seller, guys. That's called Why Do Birds Do That?
And it's all very much questions and answers. You know,
why the birds stand on one legs, why the birds
have feathers? Why do birds?
Speaker 9 (45:06):
You know?
Speaker 1 (45:06):
Any question about why the birds? It's going to be
in there. And my third book is Why the Birds Sing,
And again it's done around questions and answers. And I
look a lot at the brain, so I look at
the personality around in birds, so like the neocortex, and
you know, can they count? Can they categorize?
Speaker 9 (45:23):
You know?
Speaker 1 (45:24):
How do they learn to sing? Can the death bird
learn to sing? How do they sleep? Do they dream?
What they dream of? She had a little little spoiler.
They dream and song They.
Speaker 5 (45:33):
Actually when the young birds learning, so that night it
will actually dream of as far the song and that
helps it learn at the next morning. And tell you
this book why the birds Sing? And they have my
Australian magpies on the cover. I said, this book needs
Australian magpie. Sort of given me two Australian magpies singing
at a bird bat and I love it.
Speaker 2 (45:53):
I am so excited. This is right up.
Speaker 4 (45:56):
We're going to have to bring you and September, I
think to talk about this.
Speaker 5 (46:01):
This is really interesting to us have the read of
the book because it's all around language, and I talk
about the importance of female song that's often ignored we
look the male song.
Speaker 1 (46:10):
So yeah, and I would yeah, happily Chatawaitius about it.
Speaker 2 (46:14):
I mean, I mean some people may actually think it's
a stretch for us to be talking about this topic
on Monster Talk, but think about it. I mean the
stories that we tell about monsters are are very similar
to the stories that birds telling song about. Look out
here comes danger, you know, it's it's exactly, this is
so primal, it's so probably yes, so core, just what
(46:34):
it means to be alive, because in our world some
people eat you know, and maybe you don't want to
be eaten.
Speaker 5 (46:42):
You know, when you're in a forest, are you somewhere
and it's no song and it's just quiet, Yeah, yeah,
there's no bird song. And even the idea of the
raven on the castle wall or on the big cathedral
and it's foggy out like it just makes you feel chills,
like the ultimate setup for any horror movie.
Speaker 2 (47:04):
Bird they are, Yeah, cor fits on the.
Speaker 1 (47:09):
Next one when the book comes out. And monsters that fantastic.
Speaker 4 (47:14):
Yes, definitely lots to talk about, so we'll keep it.
Speaker 2 (47:17):
They have a lot of potential.
Speaker 6 (47:18):
Oh yeah, I didn't didn't meant to warn you about
the punk I with a plasant surprise.
Speaker 1 (47:27):
You didn't ruin it.
Speaker 2 (47:28):
It's fantastic. All right. Well I'm gonna let us go then,
have a.
Speaker 4 (47:32):
Good night, good day, good day, lovely Saturday. Thank you,
thank you, thank you.
Speaker 3 (47:40):
You've been listening to Monster Doc, the science show about monsters.
I'm Blake Smith and I'm Karen Stolsner.
Speaker 2 (47:48):
You just heard an interview with doctor Grana Cleary about
Australian magpies. I found her delightful to talk to and
really want to check out her Bird books, especially the
new one coming out in September. Writing books is hard
work and often doesn't pay very well at all, but
when you have one in your heart, the best you
can do is to get it out there. Karen's in
England this week on a promotional book tour for her
(48:08):
latest bitch, The Journey of a Word, and she's got
a free copy of the audiobook version of that, which
I will be giving away to one of our Patreon
listeners next week. This is open to any Patreon subscriber
at any level. If you're on the list, you're entered.
It's not a contest. I'm just gonna randomly select one
of you Patreon subscribers and send a book to you.
I'll let you know who won it next week. We
(48:30):
hope you enjoyed this episode of Monster Talk. Our goal
here is to bring you the best in monster related
content with a focus on scientific skepticism and critical thinking.
If you enjoy our show and want to support our mission,
start out by visiting monster talk dot org forward slash Support.
That's monster talk dot org forward slash Support. There you'll
(48:53):
find links to our Patreon page, as well as a
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(49:16):
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(49:38):
from someone you love. Monster Talk theme music is by Peach.
Stealing Monkeys twenty twenty five is now officially halfway over.
I don't know about you, but I can't wait to
see what's next.
Speaker 1 (50:40):
This has been a Monster House presentation.
Monster House Presents.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Hey, they're Monster Talkers. It's been a rough week here
at Munster talk manner. In twenty twenty, like many of you,
I had my life turned upside down by the pandemic
and the economic hit of that disaster, and for the
second time in my career, I had to burn down
through my life savings to survive. But thanks to a
listener to this very show, I got introduced to a
manager at Stanford University and just in the nick of time,
(00:33):
landed the most amazing job that I never even dreamed
of doing. I was a robotic process automation specialist for
Stanford University. In the past five years have been incredible.
My fascination with innovation, especially in the computing space, had
put Stanford in an elevated place in my heart because,
along with my Tea, it's one of those key birthplaces
(00:55):
of much of the tech that makes this modern world work.
I was working remotely, but times I got to go
visit campus, and my first visit I stayed on campus
at the hotel next to the Stanford Linear Accelerator or SLACK,
and I made a pilgrimage to so many Silicon Valley
sites and when I went to go get coffee and
pull Ya Hall. It was next to Vince Serf's old
(01:15):
office where he helped create TCPIP And when I visited
my clients in Pinehall, it's where Cisco's Systems was born.
And my first units experience had been on SUN named
for Stanford University Networks. This was a dream job, and
for the first time in my life, I thought I
had found a place where I could actually work until
I retired. Well, I don't like to talk about politics,
(01:37):
but this current administration is run by very wealthy people,
and a couple of them and I'm looking at you,
Peter Thiel and Mark and Dreesen really hate Stanford and
universities in general. The administration is attacking many universities, and
they're cutting federal funding for science research, and they're attacking
the universities themselves with punitive tax hikes. It's almost like
(01:59):
this administration doesn't want people to have higher education at all,
or perhaps any education, to be blunt. Anyway, they hit
Stanford with one hundred and fifty million dollars budget shortage
because of these tax hikes, and sadly, I am a
casualty of that carnage. I really don't have the right
words to describe how sad this makes me. But I
(02:20):
don't even have time to mourn because with my wife
also newly unemployed, we are scrambling to get our resumes
out there as fast as we can. Now. My specialty
for the past decade has been process automation and process
improvement using what's called robotic process automation or RPA. But
the truth is I just like making people's jobs easier
with automation and computing. This show's not going to become
(02:43):
about my employment challenges, but it would be irresponsible to
my family to not at least say that I'm looking
for work now, and if you have any leads of
that sort, I would be happy to send you my resume.
Normally I would say send them to me my Monster
Talk email address, but let's just skip that because that
email is a forwarder and sometimes it loses messages. So
if you have an opening or think you need someone
(03:03):
like Blake Smith at your work, send an email to
you doctor Atlantis at gmail dot com. That's fully spelled
out doc t O r at L E. N Tis
at gmail dot com. That's my personal email address. And
I know this is a long shot. Anyway, the kind
of work I do is not well known to most people,
but I'm really good at it and I enjoy it immensely,
and I like fixing stuff and making people's lives easier.
(03:25):
So I hope that I can continue to work in
that space. In the meantime, I've got a few weeks
before the panic really hits, and I'm going to put
some of my decade long research.
Speaker 3 (03:35):
Into innovation into something tangible.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
I don't know how this will work out exactly, but
I've started a new feed on Patreon where I'm going
to release some of my writing and thoughts on my
innovation work.
Speaker 3 (03:44):
It's not live yet, but it will be this week.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
That's going to be located at patreon dot com Forward
Slash the Invention Fallacy. That's not going to be a podcast,
although I may post some interviews there in the future.
It's a good old fashioned blog of chapter material, and
I think it'll be a useful step into turning my
work into a complete book and not just a bunch
of notes and thoughts. So one more thing here, I'm
not trying to make anybody sad. My family's challenges are
(04:09):
far from unique. We're just having a lot of them
all at once, and even my pathological optimism is being
stretched a little thin. But if you like this show
and would like to see it continue, I cannot think
of a better time to support us on Patreon. If
you're listening to the free feed right now and are
a longtime listener, I would really urge you to consider
even the lowest tier of support. Ditch your commercials, enjoy
(04:30):
unbleeped conversations, extra content, and often there's really fun conversation
and discussion on the episodes on Patreon. That'spatreon dot com
forward slash Monster Talk all one word. Okay, that's enough
begging for a miracle. Let's get to some good old
fashioned monstrutal. It's actually quite unlike anything we've ever seen before.
(04:57):
A giant, hairy creature part ap.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
In Luckness, a twenty four mile long bottomless lake in
the highlands of Scotland, get a creature known as the
Luckness Monster. Monster Talk.
Speaker 3 (05:33):
Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters. I'm
Blake Smith.
Speaker 4 (05:38):
And I'm Karen Stolsner.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
This week, you may be wondering how we can justify
an episode about magpies on a show about monsters, and
these aren't even proper European magpies. They're Australian and they're
not even corvids. But they fall into our monster adjacent
content because they're the victims of that most powerful of
all human inventions, scary stories. Now you might think bombs
(06:01):
or guns are our most deadly creations, but I would
seriously argue their stories are far more dangerous. You can't
kill stories, and they are often the motivation behind tragedy
and horror, witch trials, pigrams, wars, mobs. They're always started
by stories. Stories can turn a harmless immigrant into a
(06:22):
vicious criminal in the minds of a public unequipped to
evaluate such claims, and we hope that the methods of
inquiry that we talk about on this show help individuals
think about such matters critically, because it's simply impossible to
stop the spread of stories, and the best hope I've
been able to come up with is teaching people to
ask whether such claims are true and how to evaluate
(06:43):
them on one's own, which brings us to our topic.
The Australian magpie, a bird much maligned by folk wisdom
and story, and there's other reasons I think today's interviews
within our bailiwick, but we'll discuss those explicitly during the interview.
I have too many intellectual interests, but the fact that
your listening suggests you probably do too. I used to
(07:06):
watch BBC documentaries every Sunday night on PBS, and David
Attenborough was like my kind biology teacher who never gave homework.
Now there's a lot of myths about these birds, so
let's go find out what's real, what's made up, and
whether bigfoot hunting could qualify as citizen science. MORBs Trutle
(07:26):
welcome Grania Cleary to Monster Talk. Would you mind introducing
yourself to our listeners and telling us a little bit
about who you are and what your relationship is with birds?
Speaker 1 (07:37):
Okay, my name's Grona Cleary.
Speaker 5 (07:40):
I am come from Ireland still, even though I'm now
an Australian citizen. I moved over to Australia into thansand
and seven with my husband. I got my PhD in
badger ecology in Ireland and moved to the one continent
that doesn't have five.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
Years, Australia.
Speaker 5 (07:55):
And once I was here, I still worked with mammals
in universe. You have New South Wales Sydney University. But
the birds always kind of caught my eye. It's factually
because like Australia had such fantastic birds. I mean, if
you want to study birds, if you want to see birds,
come to Australia. Go to Africa for your big game, Australia.
Speaker 1 (08:14):
For your birds.
Speaker 5 (08:15):
So I'm over here doing field work on rodents, on rats,
and I just noticed the birds all the time. You know,
they just you just can't help pronounce them. So that
really sparked my interest. And I came out of academia
and worked for not for profit organization and I was
doing citizens science, so engaging the public in what's going
on in their back garden, and I did it with birds,
(08:36):
and I was looking at the use of water in
the backyard and what birds were visiting, and what was
the different species and how often would they stay for
and the passion that people had for their birds, and
the questions they came back and after me and the
pictures they would show me. I Oh, the envy I
would get and like that really united it because I wanted,
(08:56):
you know, I wanted to know more, and you know,
they wanted to tell me the big question that always
came back to was can I feed my birds? Because
in Australia that the hard line don't feed birds, and
that's not good enough because we have been feeding birds since.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
Before the farming.
Speaker 5 (09:12):
Revolution, like before the agricultural revolution. We have engaged in birds.
People are going to do it. It's in our DNA,
so we need to do it properly. And that was
kind of the start of my journey with birds, where
like people are going to interact with birds and are
going to feed birds regardless of you know what bird
life says.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
You're always going to get people who are going to
do it.
Speaker 5 (09:30):
So let's give them the skills, which is what they
came to me asking for, so we can do this properly.
So you know, don't feed the magpie min's meat, you know,
look at feeding the meal worms. You know, don't feed
them every time they fix, and you just need little
guidelines to help them engage with the birds more healthy.
Speaker 4 (09:46):
Wow, that's such a fantastic story.
Speaker 6 (09:48):
I just love how you came to studying birds and
everything that you've done.
Speaker 4 (09:52):
And as you can hear, I grew up in Australia.
Speaker 6 (09:55):
And I really miss our unique birds, iconic birds, Rosella's
and Koka.
Speaker 4 (10:01):
Bars and Laura keats and of course magpies.
Speaker 6 (10:03):
And so the reason I found you and tracked you
down was that when I was about eight years old,
I was walking with my mother and we were somewhere
in Sydney and a magpie swooped at us and attacked
my mother and we had to go and see an ophthalmologist,
and she had some eye issues for a while. And
(10:24):
it was just quite recently, so maybe a couple of
months ago, that I was going for a walk myself
and I was swooped by one of our local birds,
a blackbird now I think as a red winged blackbird,
and it reminded me of what happened when I was
a kid, and I mean throughout my life growing up there.
I lived in rural parts of Australia too, and going
(10:46):
and putting washing on the line as you do in Australia,
not so much here in the States, but certainly there
you get attacked by magpies who you swoop. And so
I thought, I want to talk to someone about magpies
because there's such interesting birds. We've got a lot of
questions to ask you, But could we start with talking
a bit about what exactly in Australian magpie is and
(11:07):
are they really magpies?
Speaker 5 (11:10):
Okay, so they come from a songbird first of all,
like a lot of our birds are. So we compare
them to the European magpie. The European magpie is also
black and white like the Australian magpie. Now, when the
first settlers, all the Europeans, came over to Australia in
the seventeenth century, they saw the magpie. They what wasn't
(11:32):
you didn't even have a name. The Aboriginals had their
own name for it. I was based more on the
song I believe, but they they immediately said, oh, sure,
it looks like the magpie back home, we call it
the magpie. But it's actually more it belongs to a
different family. It's not a Covid. Now, Covid is what
the European magpie belongs. It belongs to, and a lot
of the other magpies, I think also in America belonged
(11:53):
to the Corvid family. The Australian magpie was just called
that because it looks like in European magpie.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
So we have the.
Speaker 5 (12:00):
Magpie lark here, which is a corpd and it's called
a magpie log because it looks like a smaller magpie.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
They really had no imagination those first settlers.
Speaker 5 (12:10):
It looks like a magpie that looks like a smaller magpie.
So that's not called that a magpie lark more based
on that black and white coloring than anything else.
Speaker 1 (12:18):
Is by god it's name, but.
Speaker 5 (12:20):
It's actually more While I say, both of the songbirds,
corvids aren't known to sing, but the Australian magpie is
a well known singer. As you know, it is the
sound of Australia and it's just you.
Speaker 1 (12:32):
You can't help but listen to it.
Speaker 5 (12:35):
And they're also known as the policeman of the bush
because when you're out in the bush, it's always the
magpie watching you. You know, will be silent, but it
will be there watching you as you walk around.
Speaker 1 (12:44):
So they're just fabulous birds.
Speaker 2 (12:47):
Well you know, crows don't sing, but they have just cause.
So these birds, they're black and white. I have only
seen one picture of them in preparing for the show,
but I've seen the European magpies. Now there's similarities. I
(13:08):
assume is this due to conversion evolution, and does that
conversion evolution also include like a higher cognitive capacity, and
I imagine that's not even related to the coloring. But
I'm just wondering, are they smart light magpies and are
they colored for similar reasons or do we know?
Speaker 1 (13:24):
You know, yes and yes.
Speaker 5 (13:27):
So if you think about the urban environment, birds of
certain colors do very well, and colors such as black
and white or boat colors that are produced by the.
Speaker 1 (13:38):
Melonin in the skin, So it means that the feather.
Speaker 5 (13:41):
Structure is very robust, it can deal with wear and
tear so and it also gives good camouflage. It's effective
camouflage in dappled light or contrasting surfaces, so that black
and white is a good adaption and it's good for
urban areas because of the traps, including the wear and
tear on the feathers.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
So if you think.
Speaker 5 (14:03):
About European magpie, he is black and white, but eat
his tail and even some of its dark and feathers
have iridescence in it of olives and kind of all
of these greens and purples. The Australian magpie not so much.
It's much more just the two colors, and for the.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
Conversion evolution it's more so conversion evolution Just for those
who might be too sure.
Speaker 5 (14:24):
It's a process where unrelated species evolve similar traits independently,
and it's often due to adaptions to similar environments or
ecological natures, so such as the urban environment. Like the
two types of magpies. Also think about wings on bats,
in sects, birds, they all develop the type of wing
to fly, So that's conversion evolution.
Speaker 1 (14:44):
So the adaption to urban.
Speaker 5 (14:45):
Areas with the smartness as you mentioned, Yes, magpies are
very very smart, and as are the core fits the
European magpie. And this intelligence seems to go hand in
hand with being able to live and do well in
urban area.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
Yes, because this is not your natural habitat.
Speaker 5 (15:02):
We are cutting down trees, we are building houses, we
are playing you know fully rugby on the oval. When
they want to be foraging, they have to adapt to us.
So you constantly have to be tinking about what's the
bloody human going to do now, also while looking at
other birds and having to adapt to their surroundings, and
that drives intelligence.
Speaker 1 (15:21):
That's cognitive flexibility. It's exactly how.
Speaker 5 (15:24):
You're told, you know, don't get stuck in unproductive patron thoughts.
You know, change your thinking to adapt your circumstances. Highly
cognitive birds do this, your ravens, your pros, your magpies,
your parents, your cockatoos. They are our top intelligent birds
on that pyramid if you wanted to imagine, just as
we are the top of our primates. And then you
(15:46):
kind of look at gorillas and orangutans and that I
think you mean pyramid.
Speaker 2 (15:55):
Sorry, I can see how this is going to go.
Speaker 4 (16:02):
We've got a.
Speaker 6 (16:02):
Bunch of questions, but you've just touched upon something that
I'd like you to expand on a little bit. And
that's just how incredibly smart magpies are. So they're not
bird brains, but I've heard that they can actually recognize people.
Speaker 4 (16:15):
Is that true? And how much can they recognize people?
To what extent?
Speaker 5 (16:19):
So this is great work coming out of Western Australia
on the magpie populations over there in urban areas. And
one of the things that looked at is audio memory.
So audio memory is identifying somebody by remembering what that
voice sounds like. So you know, we the three of us,
all are very distinct voices and it's our spectral temporal
(16:40):
envelope that this defines that voice like, you know the
rhythm of my rhythm being a bit faster. You know
him from Georgia, a bit of a slow talker. You
know how all these things change. Birds are the same,
so they can identify. Magpies can identify each other by
their call. So they'll hear a colum they'll say, oh, yeah,
the vocal signature in that call relates.
Speaker 1 (17:04):
To you know, Jimmy over there, who I met this morning.
Speaker 5 (17:06):
So they had so they have it does them well
remember who was calling.
Speaker 1 (17:10):
And it's the same with people.
Speaker 5 (17:12):
So this study in w A looked at people who
provided food for magpies to people who the magpies never
had experience with, and they sure enough, the magpies were
quick to learn the voices the call of those people
who had fed them food.
Speaker 1 (17:25):
So they we could remember.
Speaker 5 (17:27):
Distinct voices depending on their experience with those people. You know,
it does a bird weld remember who's feeding them, because
you know, food can be a limited resource and it
can really you know again again aids five in the
urban area, so they definitely remember.
Speaker 1 (17:40):
You can recognize voices, and it's the same with faces.
Speaker 5 (17:44):
Although there hasn't really been good studies done on magpies
and Pacific. We have seen it in corporates, especially crows
where and ravens where they'll remember an experimenter who wears
a nasty mask and interacts badly with the with the
ravens and then comes back where the different masks. The
bird responds differently with the nasty masks. They see it
(18:04):
as a threatening you know, this was the individual that
hurt me, so you know it will it will kind
of display threatening behaviors. While when the experimental wore a
neutral mask, the ravens didn't recognized you know, the ravens
looked at face and didn't recognize the you know, the mask,
so didn't attack it.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
So there are we have seen it in.
Speaker 5 (18:22):
Other birds that they can so I do believe that
the magpie will be able to do this. And you
have so many citizens scientists talking about that magpies recognizing
even the sound of the car when they're coming home
from work.
Speaker 4 (18:33):
Fascinating.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
You know you mentioned citizens scientists. This comes up a lot.
You know, our show is monster Talk, and a lot
of our I guess the people in the field of
crypt's wology. You know, we're a skeptical show, but a
lot of people like to go out and look for bigfoot,
and you know, and they think they're doing research, and
maybe they are to an extent, but you know, most
of them aren't trained in how to keep logs, you know,
(18:56):
and actually pay attention to the times and the situation
and what they're seeing. And there's so much data that
you can collect that kind of gives you an indications
of why wildlife's behaving certain ways, and if you sort
of share that data, it becomes useful for drawing conclusions.
(19:16):
Are seeing correlations anyway, right, And so I take it
that birders are a little bit like amateur astronomers, that
the level of the citizens' science is a little stronger
than maybe coming out of what's in Bigfoot.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
I love, I know, I love, I love love that question.
Speaker 5 (19:34):
So with the citizens science, so like the experiments I've run,
it would be based around the bird bat in people's
back gardens, So they would be told to monitor once
a day for twenty minutes and record the number of
species a visit.
Speaker 1 (19:48):
So that twenty.
Speaker 5 (19:49):
Minute window, it means that I can compare your data
to someone else who also conducted the study for twenty
minutes on their bird bat, their comparable studies. So something
like going out to track bigfoot. If they did transact
lines and they did it, maybe not at the same
time each day, because it's bigfoot in a certain area,
and if you go randomly, maybe you're just going to
(20:10):
miss them and only seeing one out of ten times.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
But if you actually did it at it more, you know,
if you.
Speaker 5 (20:15):
Taught about it more critically and thought, okay, if I
checked this area at this time for you know, such
a period of time and then change the time to
see you know, you kind of have to think about
like that instead of just doing it randomly and then
you see them.
Speaker 1 (20:25):
But there's no trant, do you get me?
Speaker 2 (20:29):
Yeah, finding trends over times, youation, weather, all that stuff.
Speaker 1 (20:33):
Yeah, absolutely, exactly, exactly.
Speaker 6 (20:37):
Well, if I may, I'll get to the crux of
why I wanted to talk about magpies, and that is
why do they swoop at people? And are they just
being mean or is there a particular reason for it,
or is it something that both males and females do
or just one of the sexes or tell us all
(20:57):
about the swooping.
Speaker 5 (21:00):
So, first of all, I am speaking on the side
of the magpie.
Speaker 1 (21:04):
I represent the Australian magpies.
Speaker 5 (21:06):
And they are being unfairly portrayed in the media, such
as your open comments about them swooping from the air.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
Americans from coming.
Speaker 7 (21:16):
Over here, don't take the magpies are coming out of
the sky to kill them and take the babies. Swooping
behavior is something a lot of birds do, especially birds
that live in groups. So you might remember noisy miners,
those honey eaters, that brown birds or gray birds with
the yellow eye.
Speaker 5 (21:34):
They're very prolific and they hang out in little mobs
and they'll swoop you. And so swooping isn't is a
mechanism birds use to deter other birds or deter predator.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
So you might sometimes see on Facebook, like a fox
or a cat getting.
Speaker 5 (21:49):
Harassed by birds. The birds are following them. That's that
swooping behavior talking about. So it's something that's present.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
In nearly all birds. It's just a bit behavior response
to a treat.
Speaker 5 (22:00):
Now, we talked about how your magpies are living in
urban areas, and there are a lot of trats in
urban areas. So you're dealing with cats, you're dealing with dogs,
you're dealing with foxes, you're dealing with people, and you're
dealing with other magpies trying to.
Speaker 1 (22:13):
Get your tree.
Speaker 5 (22:14):
We're under the assumption that all magpipes get to set
up home every spring.
Speaker 1 (22:18):
That's not true. The cream of the crop gets the nest.
Speaker 5 (22:22):
A lot of magpies don't get to secure a tree
because then you know, they're not territorial territorially strong enough,
or they can't you know, they can't defend the tree,
or they can't drive off another magpie to gain their tree.
So you'll have individuals that will nest every year and
they'll use the same tree, and they've got to defend
this tree every single year. During breeding season, which is
(22:43):
when we see a lot of the swooping, it will
often be the male and the female is on the
nest with chicks or with eggs.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
So it's a.
Speaker 5 (22:51):
Highly vulntable time when when the risk of these eggs
or these chicks dying is very high. That father is
having to look after the chicks. He's got to look
after his missus. He's got a defend from the cats,
he's got the fan from the foxes, he's got a
defend from other magpies coming in trying to run his
missus off.
Speaker 1 (23:06):
He's got a defend from you walking down the street
not noticing him.
Speaker 5 (23:09):
He gave you a warn He was like, hello, and
you see me, and you acknowledge me.
Speaker 1 (23:13):
You and your man were chatting away to each other.
Speaker 5 (23:16):
What if you guys had stopped and acknowledged or looked
at the magpie, you know, it would know that you
saw and it was kind of that that magpie is
smart enough to know that you're not going to threaten it.
So that's one of the messages we're trying to send
people is throughout the year, make friends with your magpie.
And again, something like less than ten percent do this,
(23:37):
and it is something that happens, you know, in a
highly urban area and most of the time, you know,
if you're talking to the magpie during the year and
it gets to know you, especially if you're doing a
walk and you're walking past the same individuals.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
They do get to know you, and they won't see
you as a treat.
Speaker 5 (23:51):
This swooping is very much because that magpie is like
feeling very threatened by you and he just wants to
protect his baby and his missus.
Speaker 1 (24:00):
Things your fault, you know right there, You know.
Speaker 6 (24:06):
That makes that makes sense. That's thank you for that inside.
That really does make sense.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
I was thinking, So the birds that don't get a tree,
do they are these? I mean, that's that sounds like
a pretty small percentage you're making it. Or do the
others find somewhere else or or are they I don't know,
n cells.
Speaker 5 (24:26):
So so what usually happens is that hang out in
a bachelor flock and they'll just try each year. They
will sometimes when you have a pair, they'll try a
different tree. But if the nest is lost, like if
there's a bad storm and the last get blown out
of the tree, they won't tend to try again in
(24:46):
that area.
Speaker 1 (24:47):
They'll try and look for another tree.
Speaker 5 (24:49):
So you will have individuals who will just try but
won't succeed, or you know, they use the wrong material,
will have a lot of rain and the nests will
get waterlogged. So there's all these things that you got
to consider from the back point of view. Location, location, location,
and once you find that tray, you defended.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
And if you've got to swoop.
Speaker 7 (25:06):
That little girl with pigtails, by god, it raggs, you.
Speaker 5 (25:12):
Know, but it is it is about sharing our space
and understanding it from the bird's point of view.
Speaker 6 (25:17):
Yeah, sure, that's why we, Yeah, we wanted to bring
you on into set the record straight.
Speaker 2 (25:23):
Poor bachelor flocks, all of them having a place to stay,
having to shop at Megpika.
Speaker 5 (25:33):
It's going to try to drive out Bruce from that
big gum trade.
Speaker 1 (25:36):
My god, is he?
Speaker 5 (25:37):
So?
Speaker 1 (25:37):
Yeah, Bruce is very wild up this season. And the
other thing is to be like leave the bird alone.
Just take a different route.
Speaker 5 (25:43):
You know, we are route as they say over here,
you know, just just give them the bird space. It
only happens for a very short period, and again it's
very unlikely to happen. I'll tell you my story about
being swooped by a magpie I live with. I have
I keep and I live with them because it's like
I do live with them to glass. So glass are
type of coppertoo over here that the ones with the
beauty I think you call them pink and gray cockatoos.
(26:07):
That got the beautiful pink and the gray bats. So
we have them on little harnesses and we walk them
around our local park. And there was this female, yeah,
and there was this female magpie and she was feeding
away on the grass and she saw us coming and
she swooped me. And that swoop was very much this
is my area. I'm feeding here.
Speaker 1 (26:26):
You and your.
Speaker 5 (26:26):
Glass move on because glass will forage in simple in
similar areas. So the magpie and you know it wasn't
me stupid, he was telling me move on, keep walking.
Speaker 8 (26:36):
Love.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
Yeah, Well do they really do they steal shiny things?
Or is that just a myth?
Speaker 1 (26:45):
Okay?
Speaker 5 (26:46):
So this again is admit and it's related to the
European magpie. And where this myth came from was in
the eighteen fifties, a French play was written and the
French play was about this servant girl who was about
to face the gallows because her master accused her of
stealing his silverware, only for the last minute for it
(27:09):
to be found out that it was actually the local
magpie that became a famous plane was turned into an
opera that was highly successful in the late eighteenth century,
kind of around that time, and.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
That started the myth.
Speaker 5 (27:22):
And because ravens across magpies corvids are very intelligent, they're inquisitive.
They look at things and go what's that. So they
are known to kind of you know and you know,
investigate objects, but they don't actually collect them. They don't
keep them in the nest for the shiny treasures that
that that's very very much omit gotcha?
Speaker 2 (27:43):
Is it the Oh my gosh, there is a bird
down there that does collect and build these elaborate Yeah.
Speaker 4 (27:50):
Well that's a power blue thing, that's right. Yeah, and that.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
Does that far.
Speaker 5 (27:58):
So originally that would have been it's like feathers and flowers,
it would have gathered and it's to do.
Speaker 1 (28:03):
With attracting the female.
Speaker 5 (28:05):
So that's part of its kind of you know, to
attract the mating female. And now with European settlement and
all that and all rubbish, that's sudden to collect plastic
blue plastic objects as well. But it's used for the
same same message as the feathers and the flowers, which
is to try to attract the female.
Speaker 6 (28:23):
Interesting, well, I want to ask a couple of biological
questions too, just about their diet, what do they eat,
and how long do they live? And it seems like
they do pair up.
Speaker 1 (28:35):
It's not good for and the thing is the female.
So we we from our research is needing.
Speaker 5 (28:40):
Us to believe a lot of the groups here are
dominated by the females. So don't us can have an
easier time by kind of hanging around in the flock
in that you know area, so I'll hold the territory.
And within the territory, you'll usually have one dominant male.
He'll have a white back sometimes too, and you'll have
females and juveniles.
Speaker 1 (28:59):
The females are you she won from the.
Speaker 5 (29:01):
Previous year that's allowed to stay, or they sometimes can
be in, you know, ones that come in as well
to try to mate with the male.
Speaker 1 (29:08):
But it's usually just.
Speaker 5 (29:09):
A dominant female that will achieve the mating and the
female will actually suppress the other females for mating. So
that's a dominant male and dominant female and they'll hold
the territory throughout the year. And the carling we hear
is very much their group song, and it's their song
to define their territory, to mark that territory into show
group cohesion, which means we are a group and we
(29:30):
will work together and defend this territory together. Now, to
a listening bachelor group, they're like, oh, well, jeez, they're
gonna not gonna mats with them.
Speaker 1 (29:38):
You know that there's too many of them, and you
know they're.
Speaker 5 (29:40):
Very much gonna work together, and we think it still
has to be proven, but I will put my money
on it that there's vocal signatures in the songs, which
means the group can be recognized by other groups as
being Oh, look it's the O'Brien's the singer. They're up
early today and in the group.
Speaker 1 (29:58):
Actually in the field.
Speaker 5 (30:00):
Vitual birds, individual birds have their own voice that are
recognized by others.
Speaker 1 (30:05):
This is vocal signatures.
Speaker 5 (30:06):
It's still there's still controversy around it, but it makes sense.
This song is so important to them. It functions for
so many different reasons. And the warbling we hear, it's
actually remember that warbling you love and the magpie Yeah, I.
Speaker 2 (30:37):
Tell you another bad motivator.
Speaker 1 (30:38):
Look, that's a form of vocal practice.
Speaker 5 (30:42):
So songbirds not just magpipes, but songbirds learn that vocalization
the same way babies learn to speak.
Speaker 1 (30:49):
They listen to that caregivers.
Speaker 5 (30:51):
They spend the time just memorizing the tone, the sound
of the voice and slowly dada, the spectral temple of
the words over you know, two years is narrowed down
to when the baby dn't think can actually speak. Songbirds
do the same, but they also have to practice. If
you don't practice your language, you lose it. And magpies,
(31:12):
like most songbirds will practice that song and in Australian
magpies is the warbling song and that's them actually practicing
and they are fairly happy they do it, you know,
happily it gives them a dolphin and dolphin hits like
you know we also when we sing.
Speaker 6 (31:27):
Well, I've heard about sinsitive periods in birds. There's a
lot of theory about that, or critical periods, first language acquisition,
that's my area. But so talking about birds, I hear
a lot of birds, songbirds and magpies.
Speaker 4 (31:42):
Do you have that sensitive period? And if they miss
that window, they.
Speaker 5 (31:45):
Never learn how to sing the exactly And I have
a book coming out called Why Do Birds Singing? Coming
out September the second, and that's all about that that
critical learning period. Yeah, so things like ches and zebra inches,
it has studied and we can say it's I can't
do like it's two weeks after since hatching. And if
you have a bird and it's not exposed to song,
(32:07):
you know, if it's not exposed to the vocal recording
or an infacial bird being there, it won't learn that
its song. And after that critical period it can be
very difficult. It can reopen.
Speaker 1 (32:17):
But you know, if the bird doesn't get exposed to
song as a nestling and never really learns it no incredible.
Speaker 2 (32:24):
I know Karen's field is linguistics. For me, this comes
down It makes me think on information theory, like you
know what information is being conveyed? You know how much
did it is signal? How much of this noise? What
can they accomplish with these songs? I mean, I suspect
everybody knows most animal vocalization is about mating, But what else?
(32:45):
What else did they do it? Do they? Is it?
They else? Food? I know crows do a lot of things,
but that's quite different, I guess.
Speaker 1 (32:52):
So yeah, I love this question.
Speaker 5 (32:54):
We have the song, which is as you said, for
mark and territory attracting mate. There two big messages and
it can also be used for group coersion and for
keeping a pair of birds together. You know, they sing
and they feel reunited, but they also have calls, and
calls are the private conversations they have with each other.
(33:15):
So it's not loud, it's not far another bird and
you know, a foreign bird to listen to with forrest
partner to listen to or forrest nestlings to listen to
and those calls can give a variety of information depending
on how the bird is feeling.
Speaker 1 (33:29):
And again this has.
Speaker 5 (33:30):
Been done a lot with you know, experiments done on
the sebra finches where they have looked at you know,
when the bird is hungry that will be louder, or
when it's happy and content and you know it will
be kind of softer.
Speaker 1 (33:42):
So again that goes back to that spectral temple.
Speaker 5 (33:45):
The tone, the volume of the call will signify how
the bird is feeling. They'll also do mobbing calls, so
in the Australian magpie, the Australian magpie can actually do
use different calls depending on whatnot is seen an ego too,
seeing a raptile on the ground like a lace monitor
and other birds have learned to listen for the difference
(34:05):
in these two different alarm calls and will look up
when it does the eagle call and will look look.
Speaker 1 (34:12):
Down when it does the guana or the lizard call.
Speaker 5 (34:15):
So there are differences in the call that give out
information about different predators. And that's only the touch of
the ice boat birds. Yeah, yeah, it's a very and
other birds learning it. And but back to the magpies,
and the magpies will will point at the guana or
point up at the eagle, and other magpies will join
(34:36):
it and also point so it doesn't when it sees
the predator, it does doesn't just flee like a chicken
wood or a smaller prey bird. It will actually go
and say, okay, this is an eagle. If I, you know,
call for this, get me mates around.
Speaker 1 (34:49):
We point to it. We say we see you, We
see you. When your back off, we see you.
Speaker 9 (34:53):
Go on.
Speaker 1 (34:56):
Wi the predator. Because the predator has been caught, they've
all seen it.
Speaker 5 (35:01):
So yeah, the location and yeah, there's so many clever
experiments to try to determine what the birds is seen.
Speaker 1 (35:09):
Yeah, so it looks like they do, and they.
Speaker 5 (35:10):
Can combine calls the even sand defy messages, you know,
such as the guana first.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
It's the eagle call. Yeah. I could go on, I
could go on, but stop myself.
Speaker 4 (35:21):
Oh no, it's amazing.
Speaker 6 (35:23):
I've read studies about a Vervet monkeys and Diana monkeys
and how it's gotten to the point where sometimes birds
can recognize the monkeys calls and monkeys can recognize the
birds calls. It's really amazing.
Speaker 1 (35:35):
Yeah, it's eavesdropping.
Speaker 6 (35:37):
Yeah, well, I think we could talk about magpies all day,
you know so much. This is just so so much fun.
But we should start to wind up soon. And some
of the final questions we have, I guess we'd like
to learn a bit more about how to deal with
magpies then how to live with magpies. If we have
one in our yard, should we be feeding it or
(36:00):
avoiding it or something else has should we live with them?
Speaker 5 (36:05):
So my big message is embrace what comes into your
back garden. Your back garden can provide great habitat for
our urban wildlife, So never underestimate what your little pocket
of land can do. And if you do have birds
in your back garden, provide water. Think about keeping a
bird bat And it doesn't have to be anything fancy,
(36:25):
even an old pot that you just put on top
of a table. The birds will thank you for it.
Give them time to find it, don't expect, you know,
a beautiful diversity of birds the next day. You know
they will find it. And once they find it, they
will continue to use it. And don't discriminate. Don't be
a bird racist. Don't just want to fancy. Once your
pigeon needs love as well. Your local prone needs love
(36:48):
as well. These are birds that are living with you
in a harsh, brutal world, you know, so do embrace them.
And feeding does provide a lot of joy for people.
Just please don't feed bread. Be cautious of what your
feeding them. You know, think about the bird and what
the birds need in terms of habitat and nesting areas
are always welcome, either in the form of nest boxes
(37:10):
or even different shrubs at different sizes.
Speaker 1 (37:12):
Think about different structures.
Speaker 5 (37:14):
Of vegetation in your back garden where different birds can hide,
and you have smaller birds, Put a bird back close
to the bushes and put a rock in the center
of it so small birds don't feel as exposed and
they can just jump up and down onto the rock
and then into the habitat, into the vegetation. Because a
wet bird can be you know, he can be fluntable
to a predator. So smaller birds like to bathe and
(37:35):
then go and hide very quickly.
Speaker 1 (37:36):
So think about that.
Speaker 5 (37:37):
Think about the birds in your area, think about what
you think they would need.
Speaker 1 (37:41):
You know, go to your local council.
Speaker 5 (37:43):
That's information out there and you'll be so rewarded because
it really does bring life into your garden and those
birds rely on you, and it's the type of connection
you can make with a wild species that's really.
Speaker 1 (37:53):
Beautiful, especially in this you know, this in this time when.
Speaker 5 (37:57):
The world seems the on the edge of destruction, and
so you know, em raise your birds.
Speaker 4 (38:02):
You know, that's wonderful advice.
Speaker 2 (38:05):
Yeah, I've got one more bird question before we close
down this. I'm going to preface it with this really
short story. I'm not a bird, but I have recently
gotten really interested in mocking birds, and they have this
behavior called flashing, so they raise their wings almost like
their own ratchets, and and biology that there's not one
(38:26):
hundred percent certainty for why they do this, but there's
some belief that maybe it has to do with feeding behavior,
like it somehow does something to make insects, you know,
more available. And so once I found out it was
a mystery, I started thinking about all these experiments to
try to like help, you know, kind of narrow that down,
because what I'm really curious about is how do insects
(38:48):
perceive the flashing, What does it do to them to
make this a good, you know, eating behavior.
Speaker 1 (38:54):
I love that question.
Speaker 5 (38:55):
Over here we have really wagtails again European wally wagtail.
Speaker 1 (39:00):
Yeah, so he has.
Speaker 5 (39:01):
There's they'll work together and they'll move on horses and cattle,
and as the cattle walk, the insects will move up
from the grass from the soil to a ford being
trampled on. The magpies will then go, you know, to
with the hoofs of the cattle is and start taking
these little magpies as the cattle move. So that's that's
(39:22):
what they're doing with the flashing. What that can be
on a dull day, So a dull day when the
clouds are moving, this doesn't work. On a bright, hot day,
the insects will perceive the magpie shadow of what it is,
a predator. But on very overcast days, when the light
is staffled anyway, the mag the wagtail can use its
tail to flush out by using shadow to scare the
(39:44):
magi to scare the insects up and really.
Speaker 2 (39:47):
Need but you see that there's a dark and light band.
Speaker 1 (39:52):
It's really exactly.
Speaker 2 (39:54):
But the actual question I have was are there any
sort of similar mysteries about mag pies out there or
are there things people should be looking for or wondering
about when they see these birds that are still a
hot topic in ornithology. I think the kids are going it.
Speaker 1 (40:11):
Probably at the moment.
Speaker 5 (40:12):
It is around their focal vocalization. When you're in different
areas do the bird? Does the magpipe calls sound slightly different?
So all the changes depending on where you know accents
for the want of a better word, do different magpipes
have slightly different calls and different areas?
Speaker 1 (40:30):
You can it be a good one?
Speaker 5 (40:31):
Do you othertain though it's a little bit more depressing
is with climate change and our summer's getting hotter, there
seems to be a cognitive point where they'll stop interacting.
They'll stop marking territories because they have to keep themselves cool,
So they spend a lot of time just showing you
know that gaping the wings, plays the feathers you're drooping,
(40:52):
and they won't actually engage in things like foraging, marking territory, grooming, interacting.
Speaker 1 (40:57):
With each other.
Speaker 5 (40:58):
So the thing so there are yeah, there's a lot
for the citizen scientists to watch out with. And you
guys have the Cornwell Aunitology labs over there. They do
some great work, so it hit them up as well,
and think about getting involved in citizen science projects around
birds banks.
Speaker 4 (41:12):
Yeah, some so much food for thought.
Speaker 6 (41:14):
And thank you again for all of your insight into
these wonderful birds. And you've really give me a different
perspective on them growing up with them as I did.
But we've got one final question for you, which we
ask all of our guests a signature question. What's your
favorite monster?
Speaker 5 (41:31):
I love this, I love it so my one and
this is a real one. This one would have to
be the banchee. So yeah, the banshee is an old
of course, with all of these, that's different, you know,
stories told. But the story I grew up with was
an old woman who with long, long hair, and just
before someone was going to die in your family, three days,
(41:54):
three nights before they were going to die, she'd perch
on your roof and she'd comba long hair, and she'd
weigh and she'd have red eyes from crying so much.
And when I'd go out, like when i'd be out
the next day as a kid, and I'd find a
comb on the ground, it'd be like, oh God, the
benchi was in the AIRA was going to die. And
she particularly targeted people with oh and mac in the
(42:18):
name because they're very ancient Irish names. So she wasn't
so much interested in these newcomers like the FitzGeralds, you know,
more rage than the Irish themselves. They had no booker
off your Normandy and you never got English in your blood.
She was after the old, old Orish, so those would
oh Sullivan, Macmarrow, MacDonald where her real targets. So I
had two friends, and old Sullivan and a Macmarrow. And
(42:40):
as children I used to tormentum, have you heard the Banshee?
You know you're going to hear the benchie when your
mammy died, because you're an old Sullivan, she'd be sitting
there on your garage pushing along.
Speaker 1 (42:49):
Oh my god, tormented them.
Speaker 5 (42:53):
I know.
Speaker 2 (42:54):
We've talked a lot about ghosts, and some of them
seem like they're suffering, but the Banchees are always doing whale.
Speaker 1 (43:00):
Yeah you that someone's going to die? Yeah, stop frightened.
Speaker 6 (43:07):
I think in all the years we've been doing this,
that's the first time that we've had that answer to
the Banchies.
Speaker 4 (43:12):
I believe so perfect, absolutely perfect. Given you a heritage, Really,
that's the profle banche come up.
Speaker 2 (43:18):
Yeah, no, no, Well, we've talked about Banshee's before, but
it's never been someone's favorite.
Speaker 4 (43:22):
Monster favorite yeah until yeah.
Speaker 9 (43:25):
A quick insert here. Technically, Chris Woodard did mention the
Banshee in her interview about Women in Black, but did
not explicitly say it was her favorite, merely that she's
partial to it. I know this because of the incredibly
helpful work that listener Joseph Scales has done to catalog
all of this favorite monster data. I have failed to
make his work public because I was struggling to get
(43:46):
it into a format that would show up in a
useful way on our website. But I finally got a
notion of how to make it accessible and hopefully visually useful.
So that's something I'll be working on. Maybe I'll be
able to knock get out soon. We'll see. But I
want to thank Joseph for what I find to be
an incredibly helpful reference source.
Speaker 2 (44:05):
Ah.
Speaker 5 (44:05):
Yeah, Well, the other one I would have picked been
ourriichh and I did my A lot of my education
in Scotland would have caused been lock netting, the locknet monster.
Speaker 1 (44:12):
But the one she got me, the one that you
know as the kids, the one that I have see
the code, I'll be like, oh Jesus.
Speaker 4 (44:18):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, they stick with you for sure. This
is delightful.
Speaker 2 (44:25):
Yeah, it's been a real treat. And you're so enthusiastic
about science and we love that.
Speaker 4 (44:29):
Oh yeah, it makes us feel passionate to an enthusiastic
thank you.
Speaker 1 (44:33):
Oh that's so good. That's so so good. I'm so pleased.
Speaker 4 (44:37):
Where can people find you and find your books and
your website.
Speaker 1 (44:41):
I have two books out at the moment. You can
get them on Amazon.
Speaker 5 (44:45):
It's the first one was Your Backyard Birds, and that
was my first book, and that was kind of like,
you know, you just kind of put it out and
see what happens, like the first Pancake.
Speaker 8 (44:53):
But the second book, oh, the second book that was
the best seller, guys. That's called Why Do Birds Do That?
And it's all very much questions and answers. You know,
why the birds stand on one legs, why the birds
have feathers? Why do birds?
Speaker 9 (45:06):
You know?
Speaker 1 (45:06):
Any question about why the birds? It's going to be
in there. And my third book is Why the Birds Sing,
And again it's done around questions and answers. And I
look a lot at the brain, so I look at
the personality around in birds, so like the neocortex, and
you know, can they count? Can they categorize?
Speaker 9 (45:23):
You know?
Speaker 1 (45:24):
How do they learn to sing? Can the death bird
learn to sing? How do they sleep? Do they dream?
What they dream of? She had a little little spoiler.
They dream and song They.
Speaker 5 (45:33):
Actually when the young birds learning, so that night it
will actually dream of as far the song and that
helps it learn at the next morning. And tell you
this book why the birds Sing? And they have my
Australian magpies on the cover. I said, this book needs
Australian magpie. Sort of given me two Australian magpies singing
at a bird bat and I love it.
Speaker 2 (45:53):
I am so excited. This is right up.
Speaker 4 (45:56):
We're going to have to bring you and September, I
think to talk about this.
Speaker 5 (46:01):
This is really interesting to us have the read of
the book because it's all around language, and I talk
about the importance of female song that's often ignored we
look the male song.
Speaker 1 (46:10):
So yeah, and I would yeah, happily Chatawaitius about it.
Speaker 2 (46:14):
I mean, I mean some people may actually think it's
a stretch for us to be talking about this topic
on Monster Talk, but think about it. I mean the
stories that we tell about monsters are are very similar
to the stories that birds telling song about. Look out
here comes danger, you know, it's it's exactly, this is
so primal, it's so probably yes, so core, just what
(46:34):
it means to be alive, because in our world some
people eat you know, and maybe you don't want to
be eaten.
Speaker 5 (46:42):
You know, when you're in a forest, are you somewhere
and it's no song and it's just quiet, Yeah, yeah,
there's no bird song. And even the idea of the
raven on the castle wall or on the big cathedral
and it's foggy out like it just makes you feel chills,
like the ultimate setup for any horror movie.
Speaker 2 (47:04):
Bird they are, Yeah, cor fits on the.
Speaker 1 (47:09):
Next one when the book comes out. And monsters that fantastic.
Speaker 4 (47:14):
Yes, definitely lots to talk about, so we'll keep it.
Speaker 2 (47:17):
They have a lot of potential.
Speaker 6 (47:18):
Oh yeah, I didn't didn't meant to warn you about
the punk I with a plasant surprise.
Speaker 1 (47:27):
You didn't ruin it.
Speaker 2 (47:28):
It's fantastic. All right. Well I'm gonna let us go then,
have a.
Speaker 4 (47:32):
Good night, good day, good day, lovely Saturday. Thank you,
thank you, thank you.
Speaker 3 (47:40):
You've been listening to Monster Doc, the science show about monsters.
I'm Blake Smith and I'm Karen Stolsner.
Speaker 2 (47:48):
You just heard an interview with doctor Grana Cleary about
Australian magpies. I found her delightful to talk to and
really want to check out her Bird books, especially the
new one coming out in September. Writing books is hard
work and often doesn't pay very well at all, but
when you have one in your heart, the best you
can do is to get it out there. Karen's in
England this week on a promotional book tour for her
(48:08):
latest bitch, The Journey of a Word, and she's got
a free copy of the audiobook version of that, which
I will be giving away to one of our Patreon
listeners next week. This is open to any Patreon subscriber
at any level. If you're on the list, you're entered.
It's not a contest. I'm just gonna randomly select one
of you Patreon subscribers and send a book to you.
I'll let you know who won it next week. We
(48:30):
hope you enjoyed this episode of Monster Talk. Our goal
here is to bring you the best in monster related
content with a focus on scientific skepticism and critical thinking.
If you enjoy our show and want to support our mission,
start out by visiting monster talk dot org forward slash Support.
That's monster talk dot org forward slash Support. There you'll
(48:53):
find links to our Patreon page, as well as a
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new ones, and we're also very fond of kindle editions
because of their easily searched content and without spending any
(49:16):
money at all. You can support and raise the profile
of the show by leaving a positive review at iTunes
or wherever you get your podcasts. Positive reviews help keep
us visible in iTunes, which is a great way to
help us find you listeners. Finally, remember to share episodes
you really like with your friends and family. You can
help make Monster Talk the nightlight that keeps monsters away
(49:38):
from someone you love. Monster Talk theme music is by Peach.
Stealing Monkeys twenty twenty five is now officially halfway over.
I don't know about you, but I can't wait to
see what's next.
Speaker 1 (50:40):
This has been a Monster House presentation.
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