Okay, But... Birds

Okay, But... Birds

Hosted by evolutionary biologist Dr. Scott Taylor, Okay, But... Birds explores the drama, brilliance, and science behind bird life. Each snackable 30-minute episode blends smart storytelling, expert interviews, and a touch of humor to reveal how birds shape our world. No jargon. No binoculars required. Just real science, quirky insights, and bird-brained drama you’ll want to share at brunch. Because birds aren’t background. Birds are cool.

Episodes

Okay, but why are we obsessed with crows and ravens?

October 29, 2026 • 36 mins
E46. Crows and ravens fill our oldest stories, and plenty of us want one as a friend. Dr. Claudia Wascher, professor of behavioral biology at Anglia Ruskin University, explains what makes corvids seem so clever, when clever turns out to be something simpler, and why befriending them is a bad idea. In this episode, you'll hear about: The crow named Hugo, and what his flock started saying once he was gone Why a walnut dropped at a re...
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Okay, but is the lyrebird a liar?

October 22, 2026 • 31 mins
E45. Lyrebirds can copy a chainsaw, a car alarm and a camera shutter, so it is easy to call them liars. Dr. Anastasia Dalziell of Western Sydney University has spent years recording them in the wild, and she explains what the famous Attenborough clip left out and some of the most surprising evolutionary reasons for mimicry. In this episode, you'll hear about: Why a female lyrebird starts sounding like an eagle when you get too clos...
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Okay, but what's threatening the apex predators of the sky?

October 15, 2026 • 33 mins
E44. An adult eagle has no natural predators, so why are birds of prey declining? Dr. Todd Katzner, a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, explains the surprising dangers facing golden eagles and their kin, from spinning wind turbines to a threat small enough to fit on a grain of rice. In this episode, you'll hear about: Why an eagle that can clearly see a wind turbine still flies into one How a hunter's choice of bu...
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Okay, but how terrifying were terror birds?

October 8, 2026 • 26 mins
E43. For millions of years, South America’s top predators weren’t cats or bears. They were birds, some taller than a person. Paleontologist Dr. Federico "Dino" Degrange of the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba joins us to ask whether terror birds really earned their name. In this episode, you'll hear about: The surprising weapon a terror bird actually used to bring down its prey What left bite marks on one of the biggest ...
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Okay, but what happens when a bird gets sick?

October 1, 2026 • 33 mins
E42. Birds get sick too, and a lot of what happens next looks surprisingly familiar. Dr. Andrea Townsend of Hamilton College has spent two decades following American crows through outbreaks, and she walks Scott through what illness really does to a bird, from the family it belongs to down to the clever brain it depends on. In this episode, you'll hear about: The surprising way crows choose their partners, and what it costs them whe...
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Okay, but griffins, and ligers, and birds, oh my!

September 24, 2026 • 32 mins
E41. Centaurs, mermaids, minotaurs: we have been inventing creatures that are two things at once for as long as we have told stories. Birds do it for real. Dr. Glaucia Del-Rio of the Florida Museum of Natural History studies two Amazonian antbirds that meet where a river runs out, and what their offspring say about where one species ends. In this episode, you'll hear about: Why a river can be an impossible barrier for a bird with p...
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Okay, but... cranes!

September 17, 2026 • 32 mins
E40. There are only 15 crane species on the planet, and 11 of them are in trouble. Dr. Andy Caven, Director of Central Flyway Programs for the International Crane Foundation, has spent his career on two of them: the sandhill cranes that pour into one stretch of Nebraska's Platte River every spring, and the whooping crane, which came back from the edge and is still nowhere near safe. Scott asks him what it actually takes to keep a b...
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Okay, but why does that bird look so rough?

September 10, 2026 • 31 mins
E39. Every August the questions start: there is a cardinal at the feeder with no head feathers, and it looks terrible. Nothing is wrong with it. It is molting, which every bird does at least every year. Dr. Ryan Terrill of the San Diego Natural History Museum studies what a feather endures over a year and what it takes to replace one, and he makes the case that the few weeks a bird spends looking its worst may be the most consequen...
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Okay, but what's up with feathers?

September 3, 2026 • 32 mins
E38. You have pulled one out of a jacket sleeve at a bad angle, picked one up on a walk, and you are almost certainly within arm's reach of a few thousand of them right now. Dr. Cody Limber, who recently finished his PhD at Yale, spent it taking growing feathers apart one cell at a time to find out what they are actually made of. A feather is not a fancy scale, it does not grow the way you would guess, and after all this time nobod...
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Okay, but does age bring Wisdom?

August 27, 2026 • 30 mins
E37. A bird called Wisdom was banded on Midway Atoll in 1956 and is still laying eggs today, which makes her at least 75 and the oldest known wild bird on the planet. She has also outlived the man who banded her, and most of the scientists who tracked her since. Dr. Etienne Rouby studies long-lived seabirds at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at CU Boulder, working with data from the French sub-Antarctic islands where wa...
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Okay, but do hummingbirds ever chill?

August 20, 2026 • 31 mins
E36. Hummingbirds run one of the fastest metabolisms of any animal with a backbone, which is why we picture them as permanently buzzing. Scott sits down with Dr. Anusha Shankar, assistant professor at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, who studies how hummingbirds budget energy in a world that keeps moving the goalposts. It turns out the blur at your feeder is the exception, not the rule. In this episode you'll hear about:...
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Okay, but what's the deal with Darwin's finches?

August 13, 2026 • 36 mins
E35. Eighteen species of small brown bird on a pile of volcanic rock have taught us more about how evolution actually works than almost anything else on Earth. Not because Darwin figured them out. He didn't. Because a handful of scientists went back, banded every bird on one island, and watched it happen in real time. Scott heads to the Galapagos with Dr. Erik Enbody, Assistant Professor of Computational Biology at Cornell Universi...
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Okay, but what's the deal with nests?

August 6, 2026 • 29 mins
E34. Not all birds build one, but for the ones that do, a nest has a single job and a shockingly wide range of ways to get it done. Dr. Vanya Rohwer, Curator of Birds and Mammals at the Cornell University Museum of Vertebrates, joins Scott to walk the far end of that spectrum, from nests made entirely of spit to a colony structure heavy enough to snap the tree it sits in. In this episode you'll hear about: The complete and comical ...
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Okay, but how do birds handle a heatwave?

July 30, 2026 • 26 mins
E33. When the air temperature climbs past a bird's own body temperature, staying cool stops being free and starts to cost them water they may not have. Dr. Blair Wolf, University of New Mexico, has spent his career studying how desert birds survive heat that should kill them, and what happens when it finally gets too hot. In this episode you'll hear about: Why some backyard birds can shrug off oven-like temperatures while others ju...
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Okay, but how does wildfire smoke impact birds?

July 23, 2026 • 31 mins
E32. Wildfire smoke is blanketing more of the map every year, and it turns out a smoky sky changes everything for birds, from how they breathe to whether we can find them at all. Dr. Olivia Sanderfoot, Research Scientist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, is back to walk Scott through what all that haze is doing to the birds living in it. In this episode: Birds don't breathe the way we do, and that single fact shapes everything abo...
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Okay, but did birds invent music?

July 16, 2026 • 29 mins
E31. If a bird sings a phrase worthy of Beethoven, is that music, or just biology in a nice outfit? Dr. Hollis Taylor, a violinist, composer, and ornithologist, has spent more than two decades recording and transcribing the songs of the Pied Butcherbird, an Australian songbird whose vocal life keeps blurring that line. In this episode: How a single pied butcherbird can sing for seven hours through the night, almost never repeating ...
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Okay, but is the dawn chorus getting quieter?

July 9, 2026 • 34 mins
E30. That wall of birdsong outside your window at sunrise has a name, a structure, and a surprising amount of drama. This week Scott talks with Dr. Dan Mennill, a professor at the University of Windsor who wires whole forests with microphones to eavesdrop on the entire neighborhood at once, about what the dawn chorus is actually for, and what it means when it starts to thin out. In this episode: Why dawn, why so loud, and who gets ...
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Okay, but what's it like as a bird at the top of the world?

July 2, 2026 • 34 mins
E29. Standing at 11,000 feet, lungs burning, Scott watched birds go about their afternoon in the exact thin air that had nearly taken him out. This week he sits down with Dr. Chris Witt, evolutionary biologist at the University of New Mexico and curator of birds at the Museum of Southwestern Biology, who has spent his career figuring out how birds make a living in the thinnest air on Earth. From the hummingbird blood that rewrites ...
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Okay, but does easy living make birds dumber?

June 25, 2026 • 32 mins
E28. A bird's brain is the most expensive thing it owns, and evolution doesn't hand one out for free. Dr. Carlos Botero, Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin, has spent a decade tracing what variable, unforgiving environments actually do to bird cognition, and the answer flips a lot of conventional wisdom on its head. In this episode: Why the harshest places on Earth produce two kinds of birds: the puzzle-solvin...
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Okay, but... pigeons!

June 18, 2026 • 33 mins
E27. They’ve been called "rats with wings," but pigeons are actually elite athletes, historical icons, and evolutionary marvels. Scott chats with Dr. Elizabeth Carlen, a postdoc at the Living Earth Collaborative at Washington University in St. Louis, to look past the common stereotypes and uncover the remarkable biology of the Rock Pigeon. In this episode, you’ll hear about: The deep historical bond between humans and p...
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