Category Archives: birds

Episode 474: The Button Quail Mystery

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DRAMA! Bird drama! Here are some further-reading links if you want to verify that I’m not vilifying anyone:

Buff-breasted Buttonquail: An image claimed to be of this species revealed

Buff-breasted Buttonquail: Smoke & Mirrors

A review of specimens of Buff-breasted Button-quail Turnix olivii suggests serious concern for its conservation outlook

A painted button quail:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

Back in episode 136 we talked about the button quail, because that episode was about tiny animals and the button quail is really tiny. But let’s revisit the button quail this month, because we have a mystery associated with a particular species of button quail.

Button quails generally live in grasslands and are actually more closely related to shore and ocean birds like sandpipers and gulls than to actual quails, but it’s not very closely related to any other living birds. It can fly but it mostly doesn’t. Instead it depends on its coloring to hide it in the grass where it lives. It’s mostly brown with darker and lighter speckled markings, relatively large feet, and a short little tail. It eats seeds and insects along with other small invertebrates.

The button quail is especially interesting because the female is more brightly colored than the male, although not by much. In some species the female may have bright white markings, while in others her speckled markings are crisper than the males. The female is the one who calls to attract a male and who defends her territory from other females. The female even has a special bulb in her throat that she can inflate to make a loud booming call.

The male incubates the eggs and takes care of the chicks when they hatch. Baby button quails are fuzzy and active like domestic chicken babies but they’re only about the size of a bumblebee. In many species, as soon as the female has laid her eggs, she leaves them and the male and goes on to attract another male for her next clutch of eggs.

The various species of button quail live in different areas, including Africa, Asia, and Australia. The species we’re talking about today is the buff-breasted button quail, which is native to one small area of Queensland, Australia. It grows about 9 inches long, or 23 cm, which is big for a button quail, most of which are closer to the size of sparrows, and it’s reddish-brown with darker and lighter speckles. It’s critically endangered due to habitat loss and introduced animals like cats and cattle. There are only an estimated 50 individuals alive today.

But that’s only an estimate, because no one has actually for sure seen a buff-breasted button quail since 1922. Also, I’m going to call it the BBBQ from now on because that name is hard to say.

The 1922 specimen was shot by a naturalist who was collecting specimens for a museum, which was regrettably common at the time and led to a lot of endangered species being driven to extinction. The bird was already rare in 1922 and that was the last anyone saw of it until 1985, when someone reported seeing one. People flocked to the area in hopes of spotting it, but while there were lots of sightings, no one got a good picture of a BBBQ. All the pictures, and all the recordings of its calls, turned out to be of another species of button quail, a very similar bird called the painted button quail.

It’s been 100 years since the bird was last seen, so while we have lots of museum specimens, we don’t have any modern sightings. That means two things. Either the buff-breasted button quail is probably extinct…or it never actually existed in the first place.

There are two other species of button quail that live in the same areas where the BBBQ is found, the painted button quail and the brown quail. They’re smaller but otherwise look very similar, especially the painted button quail. Maybe people were mistaking larger individuals of painted button quails as a different species.

In 2018, a team of scientists from the University of Queensland conducted a search for the BBBQ. All they found were painted button quails. But they discovered something surprising that had never been documented before. During the breeding season, the female painted button quail’s feathers are much more reddish-brown, while the rest of the year the feathers on her back are more gray-brown.

The team also studied as many BBBQ skins as they could track down from museums, where they learned something else surprising. It turns out that it’s not any larger than the painted button quail, which grows up to 8 inches long, or 20 cm. So the birds are the same size and during part of the year, they have almost identical plumage. Hmm.

That doesn’t mean the buff-breasted button quail never existed. One very distinctive difference between the painted and the buff-breasted species is eye color, with the former having red eyes and the latter having yellow. As far as I know a genetic study hasn’t been carried out on the museum specimens, but it’s likely that at least some of the specimens—maybe all of them—really are BBBQs. Scientists and bird enthusiasts are still looking for the bird, and that has led to a strange controversy.

In early 2022, a naturalist named John Young published a photo on Facebook of what he said was a male buff-breasted button quail on a nest, a photo taken by a camera trap in a secret location. The location had to be secret so that no one would try to find the birds and scare them away or damage a nest. Young said he had 16 other photos of BBBQs but wasn’t going to share them until he was ready to publish his findings. He was also raising money to continue his studies at the site.

Another naturalist thought there was something fishy about the photo. He discovered that the picture is actually a cropped and flipped photo of a painted button quail bird and nest reportedly taken at a different site—published in 2018 by John Young himself and labeled by him as a painted button quail. Young had reused one of his own photos and assumed no one would notice.

But it gets worse. Back in 2013, Young got photographs of another extremely rare Australian bird, the night parrot. One day we’ll have an episode about it. It was such a big deal that he was offered a job by the Australian Wildlife Conservancy, or AWC, to study the night parrot and the buff-breasted button quail. He documented sightings and produced photos of both birds, but he didn’t stay in that job too long. That’s because some people started getting suspicious of his parrot photos. After an inquiry into the night parrot photos, the AWC concluded that the eggs in a photo of a night parrot nest were probably fake.

And Young’s dubious photos go back even farther. In 2006 he claimed to have discovered a new species of parrot in Queensland, but while initially the Queensland government supported learning about the new species, it withdrew its support when the photo turned out to be…suspicious. It looked like Young had altered the coloration of a bird to make it look like a new species. When an expert requested the original photographs, Young said he’d deleted them.

More recently, the 2018 painted button quail photo and the supposed 2022 BBBQ photo were examined by a forensic photography expert. Young had removed the metadata from both so no one could tell where they were taken, but there’s a little white stone in both pictures that’s identical, along with many other identical details.

The problem with fake sightings and photographs is that it’s actually making things worse for the buff-breasted button quail. The AWC and other conservation groups are trying to get the bird listed as endangered, which means funding for research and conservation. Now all that is in jeopardy because it’s not clear if there have actually been any sightings of the bird at all.

Hopefully the buff-breasted button quail is still around and someone will get genuine photos of it soon so it can be protected and studied. That’s assuming it’s a real bird in the first place.

Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

Episode 467: The Dragon Bird and Friends

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Thanks to Audie, Katie, Eilee, Emily, Maryjane, and Dylan for their suggestions this week! Sorry this episode is late–the site was down. 🙁

Further reading:

Bobolinks

A frill-neck lizard showing off:

A bobolink:

The great-eared nightjar [picture by Venkata Shreeram Mallimadugula, taken from this site]:

Another great-eared nightjar [Picture by Nigel Voaden from UK – Great Eared-Nightjar, Tangkoko, Sulawesi, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=39857392]:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

This week we have an episode about some birds and reptiles. Thanks to Audie, Katie, Eilee, Emily, Maryjane, and Dylan for their suggestions! If this episode showed up later than usual in the podcast feed, it’s because I’ve been having trouble with the website and couldn’t get it uploaded until it was fixed.

We’ll kick off the episode with an animal that can’t kick, because snakes don’t have any legs. Audie suggested we learn about the scaleless rat snake, which means that first we have to learn about the rat snake, the ordinary one with scales.

Rat snakes are constrictors and are common throughout many parts of Asia, Europe, North America, and the Middle East, and they’re called rat snakes because they eat rats and other small animals like lizards, frogs, and baby birds.

Rat snakes are popular pets because they’re so pretty and they aren’t dangerous to humans. Different species are different colors and patterns, and the rhinoceros rat snake, also called the Vietnamese longnose snake, even has a little hornlike projection on the tip of its nose that points forward. I’m pretty sure we’ve talked about that particular rat snake before on the podcast, but I can’t look up which episode because the website is down.

Most rat snakes don’t grow much bigger than 5 feet long, or 1.5 meters, but a few species can get longer than that. The black rat snake, which lives in North America, can grow over 8 feet long, or more than 2.5 meters. It’s black with small white markings on the head, but snakes bred for sale as pets are sometimes white all over or partially white, or even albino, meaning an individual has a mutation where its body doesn’t produce pigment. Pet black rat snakes are also bred that don’t have scales.

That brings us to the scaleless rat snake. It’s an ordinary rat snake but it has a mutation that causes it to have very few scales. This is a mutation that happens occasionally in the wild since it’s a recessive trait, and while it can make the snake a little more vulnerable to injury, scaleless snakes can survive just fine in the wild. They do have belly scales like a normal snake, which are the ones that allow them to move around, and they may have a scattering of scales on other parts of the body too. A scaleless snake still sheds its skin once a year like an ordinary snake, since it’s actually the outer layer of skin that sheds along with the scales.

Scaleless rat snakes are popular as pets because they’re so soft and because their coloration is usually very bright. A snake’s coloration comes from pigments in its skin. A snake’s scales are actually transparent, so without a layer of scales, a scaleless snake looks even more colorful than a regular snake. Many species of snake have been found in the wild that are scaleless, but it seems to be a little more common in rat snakes.

Next, Dylan and Emily wanted to learn about the frill-neck lizard, which is found in northern Australia and the very southern part of New Guinea. It’s a big lizard that can grow almost three feet long, or 90 cm, including its incredibly long tail. Males are larger than females on average, with a bigger frill.

The frill is a flap of skin around the head and neck, and most of the time it’s folded back over the neck and shoulders so it’s not that noticeable. The lizard is pretty ordinary-looking that way, just a big gray or brown animal with a big head. But when the lizard feels threatened, or if it comes across another frill-neck lizard, it can extend the frill by moving the small bones and cartilage that act as struts, which also requires the lizard to open its mouth.

When extended, the frill is as much as a foot across, or 30 cm, and it’s marked with bright colors. Different individuals have different colored frills, red, orange, yellow, or white, or a mixture of colors and patterns. The size and color of the frill opening up so quickly will often startle a potential predator, allowing the lizard to escape. The frill-neck lizard can even run on two legs if it needs to, although it has to run with its head pointing straight up in the air.

The frill-neck lizard mostly eats insects, especially termites. It spends most of its time in trees and some people believe it can use its frill as a parachute, but that doesn’t actually seem to be the case.

Let’s move on to a few birds next. Maryjane suggested we learn about the bobolink, a type of blackbird native to the Americas. In summer the male bobolink is black with a pale yellow nape and white markings, and in winter he molts into a drab outfit of brown to help him hide. The female is brown with black streaks and stripes.

In the summer the bobolink flies to the northern United States and Canada to nest and raise babies, and it migrates to southern South America in winter. This is a huge distance for such a little songbird to travel, but it’s a strong flyer and can travel over a thousand miles, or 1,800 km, in a single day. It navigates using the stars at night and can sense the earth’s magnetic field too, which helps it find its way.

The bobolink prefers prairies and grassy areas. It eats seeds and insects, and especially likes rice and a type of caterpillar called the armyworm. It’s sometimes considered a pest because it eats so much rice, but then again armyworms are also considered pests and the bobolink eats so many of them that it has probably saved a lot of crops that way. While the bobolink is still numerous, its numbers have been in decline for years due to habitat loss.

The bobolink is most famous for its song. Both males and females sing, and males not only sing while perched, they sing while flying. The bobolink’s songs are varied and lovely. This is what the bobolink sounds like, first a song recorded while the bird was flying:

[bobolink song]

And here’s another song recorded while a different bird in a different place was perched and singing:

[bobolink song]

Finally, both Katie and Eilee wanted to learn about the great-eared nightjar, also called the dragon bird or the baby dragon.

Nightjars are nocturnal birds, and the great-eared nightjar is found in parts of southern and Southeast Asia. It can grow up to 16 inches long, or 41 cm, and is a chonky bird with big dark eyes and a broad bill that can open very wide. The “ears” in its name are tufts of feathers on the top of its head that look like ears or little horns. It can raise the ears if it wants to, but most of the time they just stick out backwards. Like other nightjars, the great-eared nightjar’s head looks flattened most of the time, and the bird itself spends a lot of time crouched down looking like a very flat bird, but then it sits up and pricks up its ear tufts, and it looks more like a thin owl with a long tail. The bird is brown with black markings, which makes it almost invisible at night.

During the day, the great-eared nightjar sits in a tree or just on the forest floor, so well camouflaged by its feathers that it blends in with the leaf litter or kind of looks like a piece of stump or broken-off branch. At night it flies around catching insects on the wing like a bat.

Instead of building a nest and laying eggs in it like other birds, the great-eared nightjar just lays a single egg among dead leaves on the ground. The egg, and the baby when it hatches, are so well camouflaged that it’s as safe on the ground as it would be in a nest way up in a tree.

The great-eared nightjar has an eerie call. This is what it sounds like:

[great-eared nightjar call]

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, corrections, or suggestions, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 457: Parrots!

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Thanks to Fleur, Yuzu, and Richard from NC for their suggestions this week!

Further reading:

World’s rarest parrot, extinct in wild, hatches at zoo

Kakapo recovery

This Parrot Stood 3 Feet Tall and Ruled the Roost in New Zealand Forests 19 Million Years Ago

The magnificent palm cockatoo:

The gigantic kakapo:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

This week we have a bird episode, specifically some interesting parrots. Thanks to Fleur, Yuzu, and Richard from NC for their suggestions!

Parrots are intelligent, social birds that are mostly found in tropical and subtropical parts of the world, but not always. Most parrots eat plant material exclusively, especially seeds, nuts, and fruit, but some species will eat insects and other small animals when they get the chance. Most parrots are brightly colored, but again, not always. And, unfortunately, most parrot species are endangered to some degree due to habitat loss, hunting for their feathers and for the pet trade, and introduced predators like cats and rats.

All parrots have a curved beak that the bird uses to open nuts and seeds, but which also acts as a tool or even a third foot when it’s climbing around in trees. All parrots have strong clawed feet that they also use to climb around and perch in trees, and to handle food and tools.

Let’s start with Yuzu’s suggestions, the cockatoo and the parakeet. A parakeet is a small parrot, but it’s a term that refers to a lot of various types of small parrots. This includes an extinct bird called the Carolina parakeet.

It was small parrot that was common throughout a big part of the United States. It had a yellow and orange head and a green body with some yellow markings, and was about the size of a mourning dove or a passenger pigeon. Its story of extinction mirrors that of the passenger pigeon in many ways. The Carolina parakeet lived in forests and swamps in big, noisy flocks and ate fruit and seeds, but when European settlers moved in, turning forests into farmland and shooting birds that were considered pests, its numbers started to decline. In addition, the bird was frequently captured for sale in the pet trade and hunted for its feathers, which were used to decorate hats.

By 1860 the Carolina parakeet was rare anywhere except the swamps of central Florida, and by 1904 it was extinct in the wild. The last captive bird died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1918, which was not only the same zoo where the last passenger pigeon died in 1914, it was the same cage. It was declared extinct in 1939.

The parakeet Yuzu is probably referencing is the budgie, or budgerigar. It’s the one that’s extremely common as a pet, and it’s native to Australia. In the wild it’s green and yellow with black markings, but the domestic version, which has been bred in captivity since the 1850s, can be all sorts of colors and patterns, including various shades of blue, yellow all over, white, and piebald, meaning the bird has patches of white on its body.

The budgie can learn to repeat words and various sounds, especially if it’s a young bird. I had two parakeets as a kid, named Dandelion and Sky so you can guess their colors, and neither learned to talk although I really tried to teach them. Some birds just aren’t interested in mimicry, while others won’t stop, especially if they get attention when they speak.

In the wild, budgies live in flocks that will travel long distances to find food and water. The birds mostly eat grass seeds, especially spinifex, but will sometimes eat wheat, especially in areas where farmland has destroyed much of their wild food. They’re social birds that are sometimes called lovebirds, although that’s the name of a different type of bird too, because they will preen and feed their mates.

Like many birds, the parakeet can see ultraviolet light, and their feathers glow in UV light. This makes them even more attractive to potential mates, as if the parakeet wasn’t beautiful enough to start with.

Yuzu also asked about the cockatoo. There are 21 species of cockatoo, also native to Australia and other nearby places, including Indonesia and New Guinea. It’s much larger than the budgie and most species have a crest of some kind. It lives in flocks and eats various types of plant material, including flowers and roots, but it will also eat insects. The cockatoo isn’t as brightly colored as many parrots, and is usually black, white, or gray, often with patches of color on the crest, cheeks, or tail.

The pink cockatoo is white with pale salmon pink markings on the body, and brighter pink and yellow on its crest. The sulphur-crested cockatoo is white with pale yellow on the undersides of the wings and tail, and a bright yellow crest. We talked about the palm cockatoo in episode 23 because not only does it look like it should be a drummer of the Muppet Animal variety, since it’s black with red cheeks and a big messy crest, it does actually use sticks and nuts to drum against tree branches, to attract a mate.

Richard from NC suggested we learn about Spix’s macaw, also called the blue macaw, because it’s considered one of the world’s rarest parrots. In fact, it was declared extinct in the wild in 2019. It only survives at all because of intensive conservation efforts, including a captive breeding program spread over multiple zoos.

The blue macaw is native to one small part of Brazil in South America, although it used to be much more common several hundred years ago. It’s blue with a gray-blue head. It’s such a beautiful parrot that it was driven to extinction by people trapping the birds to sell as pets, even though that had been outlawed by Brazil, although its numbers had been falling for centuries due to habitat loss. It relied on a particular species of tree called the tree of gold, because its flowers are bright yellow. The blue macaw nested in these trees, and its seedpods were one of its main foods. As groves made up of the tree of gold were chopped down to make way for farmland and towns, the bird became more and more rare.

Luckily, even though the blue macaw doesn’t breed very quickly in captivity, by 2022 there were enough healthy young birds to release twenty into the wild. Just a few weeks ago as this episode goes live, another egg has hatched in captivity in a bird conservation center in Belgium, after the previous hundred eggs were infertile and never hatched.

Next, Fleur wanted to learn more about the kakapo, a flightless, nocturnal parrot that lives only in New Zealand. We talked about it in episode 313, but it’s definitely time to revisit it.

The kakapo is the largest living parrot. It has green feathers with speckled markings, blue-gray feet, and discs of feathers around its eyes that make its face look a little like an owl’s face. That’s why it’s sometimes called the owl parrot. Males are almost twice the size of females on average. It can grow over two feet long, or 64 cm, and can weigh as much as 9 lbs, or about 4 kg. That’s way too heavy for it to fly, but its legs are short but strong and it will jog for long distances to find food. It can also climb really well, right up into the very tops of trees. It uses its strong legs and its large curved bill to climb. Then, to get down from the treetop more efficiently, the kakapo will spread its wings and parachute down, although its wings aren’t big enough or strong enough for it to actually fly. A big heavy male sort of falls in a controlled plummet while a small female will land more gracefully.

The kakapo evolved on New Zealand where it had almost no predators. A few types of eagle hunted it during the day, which is why it evolved to be mostly nocturnal. Its only real predator at night was one type of owl. As a result, the kakapo was one of the most common birds throughout New Zealand when humans arrived.

But by the end of the 19th century, the kakapo was becoming increasingly rare everywhere. By 1970, scientists worried that the kakapo was already extinct. Fortunately, a few of the birds survived in remote areas. Several islands were chosen as refuges, and all the kakapos scientists could find were relocated to the islands, 65 birds in total. While the kakapo is doing a lot better now than it has in decades, it’s still critically endangered. The current population is 237 individuals according to New Zealand’s Department of Conservation.

The kakapo may be the largest living parrot, but it’s not the largest parrot that ever lived. That would be the giant parrot. It’s known only from a few fossils dated to between 16 and 19 million years ago, but from those fossils scientists estimate that the giant parrot grew around 3 feet tall, or almost a meter, and possibly weighed almost twice what the kakapo weighs. It’s the largest parrot that ever lived as far as we know, and it was probably related to the kakapo.

We don’t know a lot about the giant parrot because only two fossils have been found, both of them leg bones and probably from the same individual. They bones are so big that scientists initially thought they belonged to an eagle. Hopefully soon more fossils will come to light so we can learn more about the giant parrot. For all we know, those leg bones belonged to a young parrot that wasn’t fully grown yet. Maybe the adults were even bigger than we think!

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 455: Spooky Animals

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Thanks to Richard of NC, Richard my brother, Siya, Ezra, and Owen and Aksel for their suggestions this week!

Further reading:

Creature Feature: Googly-Eyed Stubby Squid

Nocturnal Spiders Use Trapped Fireflies as Glowing Bait to Attract Additional Prey

A male vampire deer:

The adorable googly eyed squid [still taken from video linked above]:

The snowy owl [photo by Bill Bouton from San Luis Obispo, CA, USA – Snowy Owl, Bubo scandiacus, male, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19899431]:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

This week for monster month, let’s learn about some animals that are considered spooky, although in actuality they’re just regular animals who don’t even know the meaning of spooky. Thanks to Ezra, Owen and Aksel, Richard from NC, my brother Richard, and Siya for their suggestions!

We’ll start with the two Richards. Richard from NC suggested vampire deer, and my brother Richard suggested zombie salmon.

The vampire deer is more commonly called the water deer, but considering it has tusks growing down from its upper jaw that look like fangs, vampire deer is an excellent name. Females have short tusks, but in males they grow quite long, sometimes over 3 inches long, or 8 cm. Since the animal only stands about two feet tall at the shoulder, or 65 cm, that’s pretty impressive. Its hind legs are longer than its front, so that when it runs it sort of bounces like a rabbit. It has a very short tail, small rounded ears, and is golden brown in color with a lighter underside. It doesn’t have antlers. We talked about the musk deer in episode 366, which also has fangs instead of antlers, but the vampire deer isn’t closely related to the musk deer.

The vampire deer currently lives in Korea, China, and Russia although it used to be much more widespread. It mostly lives in reedy habitats near rivers, and it’s a solitary animal although females will sometimes congregate to eat. Males protect their territories by fighting with their tusks, although they don’t actually drink blood.

As for the zombie salmon, it’s not a type of fish but something that can happen to an ordinary salmon. The salmon is a fish that famously spends most of its adult life in the ocean, but travels up rivers to spawn. The eggs hatch in freshwater and the baby fish grow up in the river, and then they migrate to the ocean and live there for almost the rest of their lives. Eventually the fish is fully mature and ready to spawn, so it travels to the river where it was hatched, fights its way upstream, and the cycle starts all over with the new generation.

Almost all salmon die after spawning. This is partly because the energy requirements of swimming upstream is so high, but also because a salmon is genetically programmed to die after spawning. This is called senescence, and while it’s common in invertebrates like octopuses and some insects, it’s rare in vertebrates. Not only that, there’s not enough food for an adult salmon in the spawning area, and an adult salmon’s body is adapted for salt water, not fresh water, so it can’t live long in rivers as an adult anyway.

A small number of female Atlantic salmon are able to return to the ocean, recover and regain their strength, and spawn again a few years later, but for all other species, after spawning, that’s it. Within days all the salmon have died.

But sometimes, rarely, a salmon remains alive for weeks after spawning. It doesn’t have the energy to return to the ocean, and its body is in the process of shutting down for planned senescence, and the freshwater is causing damage to the fish’s skin. But still it survives, growing more and more raggedy, just like a zombie in a movie. But unlike movie zombies, it doesn’t want to eat brains. Eventually the zombie salmon dies, if something doesn’t catch and eat it first.

Next, Siya suggested the googly-eyed squid. Some people find squid and octopuses scary because they look so strange, but I admit I added this squid to the episode because I think its name is funny. It’s also called the stubby squid or the googly-eyed stubby squid. Its scientific name is Rossia pacifica, which gives you a hint that it lives in the northern Pacific Ocean. In the winter it likes shallow water without strong currents, but in summer it migrates to deeper water where it doesn’t get too warm.

The googly-eyed squid is small and closely related to the cuttlefish. It grows less than four and a half inches long, or 11 cm, including its eight short arms and two retractable tentacles. It’s usually reddish-brown or purplish in color, but like most squid it can change color when it needs to. It gets its name because it has large eyes that show white around the edges and have a black pupil, which makes it look like it has googly eyes.

During the day, the googly-eyed squid buries itself most of the way in sand or mud at the bottom of the sea floor, with just its googly eyes showing so it can watch for danger. At night it comes out to hunt small animals like crabs and other crustaceans, mollusks, and fish, but what it really likes is shrimp. Naturally, it has good eyesight.

Next, let’s talk about a bird that some people find spooky. Ezra, Owen, and Aksel all suggested the snowy owl.

The snowy owl is mostly snow-white although young birds have black and gray markings. Its eyes are yellow and it often hunts in the daytime, but not always. Its wingspan can be as much as six feet across, or 1.8 meters.

The snowy owl lives throughout the Arctic and nearby regions, especially in summer, but sometimes travels long distances to find food. It’s also migratory, traveling south for the winter. Snowy owls have been spotted in such far-flung places as Hawaii, Bermuda, Pakistan and India, Iran, and Japan and Korea.

The snowy owl mostly eats small animals like lemmings and mice, although it will kill and eat pretty much anything it can catch, including ducks and other water birds, fish, and even insects and frogs. It will sometimes eat carrion and even sometimes steals food from other birds. It swallows small animals whole, and a day or two later, regurgitates a compacted pellet made up of the indigestible parts, including bones and fur. A lot of predatory birds do this, not just snowy owls. Scientists who study the birds love finding these pellets, because they can dissect them and learn what the bird has been eating.

Not only does the snowy owl make its nest on the ground, sometimes it hunts on the ground too, just running along after an animal on its big feet.

This is what the snowy owl sounds like:

[owl call]

Let’s finish with an invertebrate that a lot of people are scared of, a spider! This particular spider is a species of sheet-web spider, which lives in Taiwan. It’s a nocturnal spider that was only described in 2012. Unlike a lot of spiders, which build upright webs to trap insects that are flying along between branches and twigs, the sheet-web spider builds its web horizontally just above the ground.

The webs are light-colored and reflect light. The spiders build their webs in shady areas, and scientists think that moths see the light reflecting off the webs, and think the webs are actually the ground in an area open to the sky. Moths like open areas like this, and moths also happen to be one of the spider’s favorite foods. When a group of scientists experimented by darkening some webs with charcoal dust, they determined that the darkened webs attracted considerably fewer moths.

But it turns out that the sheet-web spider does something even more extraordinary. If a firefly gets caught in the web, the spider doesn’t eat it—or at least, not right away. It lets it stay in the web, flashing its light. Scientists noticed this and were intrigued. Did the fireflies not taste good, or was something else going on?

They placed LEDs that blinked like fireflies in some webs, but not in others, and monitored the results. It turns out that three times the number of insects were attracted to the webs with fake fireflies, and most of those were other fireflies. Fireflies attract a mate by flashing. The spiders were taking advantage of having a built-in lure stuck in their webs. So even though spiders are very tiny and have tiny brains, sometimes they’re pretty darn smart.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 454: Bats!

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This week we’re going to learn about a bunch of bats! Thanks to John, Murilo, and Alexandra for their suggestions!

Further reading:

Why Bats Can’t Walk: The Evolutionary Lock That Keeps Them Flying

On a Wing and a Song—Bats Belt out High-Pitched Tunes to Woo Mates

Why some bats hunt during the day

Puzzling Proto-Bats

A pekapeka just walking around catching bugs on the ground [photo by Rod Morris, from link above]:

BLOOOOOOD! but a really cute smile too:

The western red bat looks ready for Halloween!

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

This week as monster month continues, we’re going to learn about bats! We’ve talked about bats in lots of previous episodes, but we have a lot of really neat information in this one that we’ve never covered before. Thanks to John, Alexandra, and Murilo for their suggestions!

John suggested we learn about diurnal bats and also asked if there are any flightless bats, maybe ones that live on islands. There are lots of island-living bats, and many birds that live on islands evolve to be flightless. It makes sense that bats might do the same thing–but I couldn’t find any information about any known bat that has lost the ability to fly.

The reason seems to be how highly derived bats are. That means they’re specialized, the only mammal known that has ever evolved true flight. Unlike birds, which don’t need to use their legs when flying, bats’ legs are actually part of the wings. The wing membranes, called patagia, stretch not just between the elongated finger bones of the bat’s hands, they also stretch between the arms and legs, and connect the legs too.

A January 2025 study comparing bat skeletons to the skeletons of birds determined that unlike in birds, where the size of the legs doesn’t have anything to do with the size of the wings, in bats the leg size and the wing size are closely related. If a bat evolves smaller wings, its legs also evolve to become smaller. That’s why there are no bats that resemble ostriches, with tiny wings but really long legs.

Another possible reason is that bat legs have evolved to point backwards compared to other animals. It’s not just the feet, the knees are also rotated backwards. That’s why bats hang upside-down when they’re not flying. Many species of bat never land on the ground, because they literally can’t walk at all.

But there are a few species of bats that can walk quite well. One is the increasingly threatened New Zealand lesser short-tailed bat. It lives in a few places in both the North and South Islands, as well as some small islands off the coast, although it used to be much more widespread. It’s also called by its Maori name, the pekapeka.

The pekapeka mainly lives in forested areas and is quite small. It’s brown with a lighter belly, and it has big ears, as do most bats. Its eyes are small and its vision isn’t very good, but it has a good sense of smell. Its wings are small so its legs are correspondingly small too, but its legs are also strong despite their size. It has a clawed thumb toe on its feet and on its wings that helps it climb around in trees when it needs to, and it also spends about half of its time on the ground. It walks just fine, crawling with its wings folded so that the ends point up and back, out of the way. And yes, its legs are rotated backwards as you’d expect in a bat, and it roosts by hanging from its feet in trees.

The pekapeka flies normally and catches insects using echolocation, just like other microbats throughout the world. It especially likes moths. Unlike almost all other bats, it finds a lot of its food on the ground too, using its sense of smell to track down spiders, insects and larvae, and other small invertebrates. It will actually dig into the dirt and leaf litter to find food. It also eats nectar and flowers, and is an important pollinator of some plants.

One great thing about the pekapeka is that the males sing to attract a mate. The sound is so high-pitched that it’s not practical to share it here, because you probably wouldn’t be able to hear it, but I’ll link to an article that has a sample bat song so you can listen.

Another bat that can walk just fine is one suggested by Murilo, the vampire bat. In movies, vampire bats are usually depicted as being humongous, as big as a person! In reality, those big bats are actually megabats, and megabats mostly eat fruit. Megabats are the ones that are sometimes called sky puppies, because they don’t rely very much on echolocation so they don’t have the complicated ears and noses that microbats do. Until recently scientists thought megabats couldn’t echolocate at all, but now we know they can, they’re just not all that good at it. The vampire bat is tiny in comparison.

There are three species of vampire bat alive today. They share the same subfamily, Desmodontinae, but have been classified in different genera because they differ considerably from each other. Their other relations are ordinary bats that eat insects, fruit, and other things that you’d expect from bats. Vampire bats really do eat blood exclusively.

The hairy-legged vampire bat is the most basal of the three species, meaning it retains traits that haven’t changed as much from its ancestors. It feeds exclusively on bird blood. The white-winged vampire bat also mostly feeds on bird blood, but it will sometimes eat the blood of mammals. It’s the common vampire bat that eats the blood of mammals.

Vampire bats probably evolved from ancestors that ate insects. Scientists hypothesize that they might have originally specialized in eating ectoparasites of other animals, or possibly insects that were attracted to animal wounds. If that’s the case, the bat would have already been eating a lot of blood along with the insects, and at some point it started taking a shortcut to getting that yummy blood. We know this has happened at least one other time, in a bird.

I thought we had talked about the red-billed oxpecker in an old episode, but if we did, I couldn’t find it. It lives throughout the savannas of sub-Saharan Africa and is brown with a bright orange bill and eyes, with a yellow eye ring. It eats ticks that it picks off rhinoceroses, cattle, and other large mammals, but it actually mainly eats blood. It’s happy to eat the ticks, because they’re full of blood, and the animals it perches on are happy that it eats ticks, but the bird will also peck at wounds so it can drink blood directly from the animal.

So it’s likely that the vampire bat started out eating ticks or other ectoparasites, then began eating the blood that oozed from the wound after it removed a tick. From there it was a short step to biting the animal to cause blood to flow, and within four million years, it was fully adapted to drinking blood.

The vampire bat has extremely sharp front teeth that stick out so that it can use them to make little cuts in an animal’s skin, after first using its teeth to shave the fur down so it can reach the skin more easily. Its fangs lack enamel, so they stay razor sharp. The vampire bat’s saliva contains anticoagulants, so the blood won’t clot right away and the bat can lick it up until it’s full, which takes about 20 minutes. It digests blood extremely quickly, so that it absorbs the nutrients from the blood and starts urinating the extra liquid within a few minutes of starting to feed. That way it can eat more and it can also stay light enough to take flight if it’s disturbed. If you were wondering, its poop is the same as other bat poop. It does echolocate, although not as expertly as bats that eat insects, but the common vampire bat also has specialized thermoreceptors on its nose that sense heat. It’s the only mammal known that can detect infrared radiation, and the only other vertebrates known that can do the same thing are some snakes.

Because vampire bats have to be able to walk around on animals to find a good spot to bite them, the bats have evolved to be able to walk, run, and even jump just fine. Like the pekapeka, it folds the ends of its wings back out of the way and basically walks on the wrists of its wings and its backwards-pointing feet.

Even though the pekapeka and the vampire bat are comfortable running around on the ground, neither has lost the ability to fly. Being able to fly seems to be baked into being a bat. So while it’s not impossible that a bat might eventually become truly flightless, it’s unlikely.

As for bats that are diurnal, or daytime bats, there are a few. A study published in 2018 determined that of the four known species of bat that routinely go out hunting during the daytime, all four live on islands where there are no predatory birds. That doesn’t mean that all bats that live in places where there aren’t any hawks or eagles or crows are active during the day, because most species are still nocturnal, but that seems to be the one requirement for a daytime bat.

John was also interested in learning about the biggest fossil bat ever found. Bats are delicate creatures and don’t fossilize very well, so the bat fossil record is really fragmentary. For example, until 2015 the oldest pekapeka fossil discovered was only 17,500 years old. In 2015, a new fossilized pekapeka ancestor was discovered on the South Island that’s been dated to 16 to 19 million years ago. The fossil shows that the bat was adapted to walk just as the modern pekapeka is, and its teeth are similar so it probably had a similar diet—but it’s estimated to be three times the size of the pekapeka! That sounds like it must have been a huge bat, but the pekapeka only weighs 15 grams at most. That’s barely more than half an ounce, or about the same weight as a CD or DVD, not counting the case. Its ancestor is estimated to have weighed as much as 40 grams, which is almost as heavy as a golf ball. It’s also what a typical vampire bat weighs, if you were wondering.

An even bigger fossil bat has been discovered in a fossil site in France, a country in Europe, and another in Tunisia, a country in North Africa. It’s called Necromantis and is estimated to have weighed as much as 47 grams, which is the same weight as two mice. Two nervous mice, because Mecromantis had strong jaws and big teeth, which suggests it ate small vertebrates–like mice. It lived between 44 and 36 million years ago in areas that were most likely tropical.

An ancestor of the vampire bat was even bigger, possibly as much as 60 grams. That’s just over 2 ounces! That’s a bit heavier than a tennis ball. It lived in South America during the Pleistocene, so recently that in addition to fossils, we also have subfossil remains. That means they’re mineralized but not yet fully fossilized. It’s called Desmodus draculae, and it was most likely still around when humans migrated to South America around 25,000 years ago. Big as it was, it still wasn’t as big as a typical megabat.

Because bat fossils are so rare, it’s led to a scientific mystery. We don’t have any fossils of bat ancestors that weren’t yet bats, but were evolving into bats. In other words, we don’t know what bats looked like before they evolved to be flying animals. The best guess is that the earliest bat ancestors were shrew-like animals that lived in trees and ate insects.

So far we haven’t mentioned any bats that live in Arizona, suggested by Alexandra, so let’s learn about the western red bat. Most bats are black, gray, or brown in color, but the western red bat is a cheerful orange with white shoulder patches and black wing membranes. It’s ready for Halloween all the time! Males are usually more brightly colored than females.

The western red bat lives throughout western North America in summer. It migrates to the southern parts of its range in winter, as far south as Central America. It’s also called the desert red bat but it actually spends most of its life in forests, where its red coat blends in with dead leaves. It eats insects and while it doesn’t spend much time on the ground, every so often it will drop to the ground to catch an insect before hopping back into the air. Not only that, but when the western red bat migrates, it will sometimes fly along with flocks of migrating birds in the daytime.

Unlike many bats, the western red bat is solitary most of the year. Also unlike most bats, instead of having just one baby at a time, it can have up to four babies in a litter. The mother has four nipples instead of just two as in most bats, and for the first three or four weeks of the babies’ lives, the mother has to carry them around while she hunts, until they learn to fly.

As a last note about bats, Murilo specifically mentioned that vampire bats carry diseases that humans can catch. (If diseases bother you, you can stop listening now because we’re almost done.) The common vampire bat does occasionally bite humans, usually the bare big toe of someone sleeping outside, or sometimes the earlobe or even the nose. Vampire bats do show a lot of resistance to blood-borne diseases, but they still spread diseases. The best way to avoid catching a disease from a vampire bat is to not sleep outside without shelter if you can avoid it, if you’re in an area of South America where vampire bats live. That means that if you’re out camping, bring a tent even if it’s hot. Also, avoid eating the meat of wild boar from South America. Not only can boars catch diseases from vampire bats that they pass on to humans, but wild boars also eat fruit partially eaten by fruit bats that also carry diseases. The fruit bats drop partially eaten fruit, the wild boar eats the fruit along with the saliva left on it by the bat, and then the boar can get sick from the saliva.

Most mammals can catch rabies. If you see a bat out in the daytime crawling on the ground, don’t assume that you’re seeing a very rare daytime bat that can also walk around like a pekapeka. Leave the bat alone and contact animal control, because most likely the poor bat has contracted rabies. If you touch the bat, even if it doesn’t bite you, you will have to get a series of rabies vaccines to make sure you don’t come down with rabies, which is an incurable disease and always fatal. That is way scarier than anything else we’ve ever talked about on monster month episodes!

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 453: The Skeleton Coast

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It’s October, AKA Monster Month! Let’s learn about some animals of the Skeleton Coast–which sounds spooky, but actually isn’t.

Lots of brown fur seals [photo by Robur.q – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0]:

The desert plated lizard [photo by redrovertracy, some rights reserved (CC BY) – https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/45483586, CC BY 4.0]:

Rüppell’s korhaan [photo by By Charles J. Sharp – Own work, from Sharp Photography, sharpphotography.co.uk, CC BY-SA 4.0]:

The pearl spotted owlet is cute rather than spooky, but it has a haunting call [photo by Charles J. Sharp – Own work, from Sharp Photography, sharpphotography.co.uk, CC BY-SA 4.0]:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

It’s October at last, and that means monster month! To start us off this year, we’re going to learn about animals of the Skeleton Coast, which sounds a lot more spooky than it actually is.

The Skeleton Coast is a stretch of coastline 310 miles long, or 500 km, on the Atlantic coast of Africa. It’s part of Namibia, a huge country in southern Africa that’s mostly quite dry, with two deserts within its borders. Because the country gets so little rainfall, it has to conserve water for its people, animals, and crops, so the government is serious about conservation and natural resources. It’s home to one of the most cutting-edge water treatment plants in the world, and since the government’s establishment in 1993, it’s been working to help farmers and citizens in general to practice sustainable natural resource management. It’s also a beautiful part of the world, with amazing geography, and animals and plants found nowhere else in the world, so eco-tourism has been increasing, which helps the economy.

Namibia is also home to the San people, who call the Skeleton Coast “the land god made in anger.” The northern part of the coast is blocked off from land by huge sand dunes, while the southern part is rocky. To get there, you have to cross a desert, and then cross a treacherous marsh that’s hundreds of miles across. Then to get home, you have to go back the way you came across the marsh and the desert, because launching a boat from the Skeleton Coast is impossible if you don’t have a powerful engine.

The sea along the Skeleton Coast is treacherous, with lots of rocks offshore, extremely heavy surf, and frequent thick fogs. There are around a thousand shipwrecks visible along the coast, with the oldest dating to the 1530s, and thousands more documented that aren’t visible or haven’t been found yet. Ships still wreck there sometimes.

Animals do live along the Skeleton Coast, especially seals. The brown fur seal, also called the Cape fur seal, has a huge colony in the northern part of the coast, which is a national park. The brown fur seal lives in various parts of southern Africa, with a subspecies that also lives on some islands off southeastern Australia and Tasmania. A big male can grow 7 ½ feet long, or 2.3 meters, and as you can probably guess from its name, it’s mostly brown in color. Males have a short mane on the neck that’s usually darker than the rest of its fur. It has magnificent long whiskers, especially males.

The brown fur seal mainly eats fish, but it also likes squid and will eat other animals like crustaceans and even birds. It can dive deeply and stay underwater for over seven minutes. It spends most of its life in the water, mainly only coming out on land to breed, give birth, and take care of the babies.

The seals used to be killed for their fur, but this was outlawed in Namibia in 1990 except by special permit, which has allowed the seals’ numbers to increase. The Skeleton Coast is named that mainly because of the massive amounts of seal bones that fur hunters left behind after killing and skinning seals.

Unfortunately, something the rocks around the Skeleton Coast collect are plastic debris, especially fishing debris like nets. So many brown fur seals get caught in the debris and drown that a group of volunteers called Ocean Conservation Namibia go out almost every day to help untangle seals.

The Skeleton Coast doesn’t get any rain to speak of, or only trace amounts in any given year, but it does get thick sea fogs. Most of the plants along the coast are succulents and lichens that don’t need a lot of moisture. A lot of larger animals that hunt seals along the coast actually live farther inland, like hyenas and lions. The animals that live year-round on the coast are much smaller.

That includes the desert plated lizard, which is only found in parts of Namibia and Angola. It’s a slender but strong lizard that can grow over 6 inches long, or 16 cm, not counting its long tail. It’s mainly the color of sand, tan or orange and gray, or gray-white, or some other similar variation, with a white belly, and this is because it lives on sand dunes.

The sand dunes are covered with scrubby vegetation, so in the daytime the lizards come out and eat anything they can find among the plants or in the sand, from seeds and other plant materials to insects and other arthropods. If a potential predator approaches, the lizard will dive into the sand to hide. Its scales are smooth and its legs are short, which allows it to “swim” through sand efficiently and fast. The desert plated lizard lives in small colonies, and although it only lives in this one small part of Africa, it’s extremely common throughout its territory.

A lot of birds visit the skeleton coast—306 of them, in fact, including Rüppell’s korhaan, a species of bustard that only lives in Namibia. It’s a gray and brown bird with black and white markings, with a long neck and fairly long legs. Its body is chunky but its neck is very thin, which makes it look slightly weird but very cute. It mainly eats insects, especially termites, but it will also eat small animals like lizards when it can find them, and it also eats seeds and other plant material. It’s small for a bustard, because bustards are pretty big birds, with the largest species, the great bustard that lives in parts of Europe and Asia, standing over three feet tall, or about a meter. Rüppell’s korhaan is about a third of that size.

Let’s finish with another bird that’s a little more spooky, considering that it’s October. It’s the pearl-spotted owlet, a little owl that’s found throughout much of sub-Saharan Africa, including along the Skeleton Coast. It’s a very small owl, barely more than 8 inches long, or 21 cm. It’s brown with lots of white speckles and streaks, yellow eyes, and two black spots on the back of its head that look like MORE EYES. It shares this trait with some other species of owl, including the northern pygmy owl of western North America, and in fact the two owls belong to the same genus, so they’re closely related.

The pearl spotted owlet is active during the day, but it mostly hunts at night. Since it’s such a small owl, barely larger than a typical songbird, it eats lots of insects, but it will also eat other small birds, bats, lizards, and any other small animal it can catch.

It’s not a very spooky-looking owl, despite having eye spots on the back of its head, but it has a spooky call. Listen to this and be glad you’re not a little bat hearing this sound and wondering if you’re in danger:

[owl call]

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 451: the Stellar Jay and the Gulper Eel

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Thanks to Joelle, Jacob, and Anna for their suggestions this week!

Further reading/watching:

Gulper Eel Balloons Its Massive Jaws

Watch rare footage of a shapeshifting eel with ‘remarkably full tummy’ swimming in the deep sea

The beautiful stellar jay:

The maybe not quite as beautiful but really awesome gulper eel (with its mouth full of water, image taken from first video linked above):

The same eel as above but with its mouth open so you can see just how big it is!

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

This week we’re going to learn about a bird suggested by Joelle, Jacob, and Anna, and a weird fish also suggested by Jacob.

Let’s start with the bird, the stellar jay, also called Steller’s jay! In the last few years there has been a push among bird enthusiasts to change the common names of birds named after people to names that are more general. While Steller’s jay hasn’t officially been renamed to the stellar jay, a lot of people are calling it that already so that’s what we’ll call it here. The word stellar means outstanding, and that’s definitely a good description of this bird.

The stellar jay is a beautiful bird that lives in western North America down into parts of Central America. It’s closely related to the blue jay found in eastern North America, and if you saw it from the middle down you might think it was a blue jay, except that it doesn’t have white markings on its tail and wings. It has a blue tail and wing feathers with dark bars, but from about the shoulders up it looks very different from the blue jay. It’s silvery-gray, brownish, or black on its head, neck, and back. Some populations have a white eyebrow marking that makes the bird look like it’s frowning. It has a crest like the blue jay, but its crest is bigger, spikier like it hasn’t brushed its hair yet, and the bird itself is bigger overall than its eastern cousin.

The stellar jay lives in forests, especially coniferous forests, where it eats pretty much anything it can find. It’s an omnivore that likes insects and other invertebrates, eggs and baby birds of other species, and even small animals like lizards and mice, but it also eats lots of nuts, berries, seeds, and other plant material. It will visit bird feeders, and especially likes sunflower seeds and raw peanuts.

The stellar jay is a corvid, distantly related to crows and magpies, and it shares the corvid trait of being intelligent, sometimes aggressive, and loud. It will imitate hawks in order to scare other birds away from food, and it will often chase smaller birds away from feeders. During nesting season, the birds get a lot quieter, and the male will sneak his way to and from the nest to feed his mate while she’s sitting on the eggs. The stellar jay prefers to build its nest in a conifer, either in a hollow in the trunk or on branches close to the trunk.

This is what the stellar jay sounds like:

[bird calls]

Jacob also suggested we learn about the gulper eel, which is sort of the opposite of the stellar jay. It’s a deep-sea fish with a lot of names, including pelican eel and my favorite, the umbrella-mouth. It’s black or sometimes dark brown and can grow up to about three feet long, or 90 cm. Much of its length consists of a long, whip-like tail.

The gulper eel’s mouth is ENORMOUS, ridiculously enormous, especially considering how slender the rest of the fish is. Its lower jaw is hinged and is extremely long, with a stretchy pouch of skin that forms its mouth and I guess you can call them cheeks. It is a very weird fish. Most of the time it keeps its jaw folded down against its sides, so that the jaws are barely visible and it looks more or less like a regular eelh. But when it wants to, the gulper eel can unfold its jaw and gulp in water to inflate its pouch, which makes it look like a black balloon with a tail. It sometimes does this if it feels threatened so that it looks bigger, but the huge jaws are actually for swallowing animals whole.

Not only can its mouth stretch to engulf animals bigger than the gulper eel is, its stomach can stretch just as much. It has tiny teeth, though, so it’s not likely that it would try to eat animals stronger than it is, because if it swallowed a big fish, that fish might thrash around inside the gulper eel and kill it. More often, the gulper eel’s stretchy mouth and stomach allow it to eat large groups of very small animals, mostly shrimp and other small crustaceans. It also helps it swallow squid and other soft-bodied animals that are larger than it is but not dangerous.

The gulper eel has a well-developed lateral line system, more properly called the octavolateralis system. All fish and some amphibians have this system, and in many species you can see it. It’s a line or a series of dots along the fish’s sides, and it’s actually a series of modified cells that are super sensitive to water motion. The lateral line system is what allows schools of fish to stay in formation while moving around as a group, and it also helps a fish know when a predator is approaching or when potential prey is nearby. It can even help the fish sense obstacles in the water that aren’t moving, like rocks. In the gulper eel, instead of the sensory cells being in a tiny canal under the skin, they’re on the surface to increase the amount of information the fish can gather from tiny water movements.

At the end of the tail, the gulper eel has a tiny organ called a caudal appendage, which is translucent. It has tiny tentacles and glows with a pinkish light, although it occasionally flashes red. Some researchers report that the lateral line also sometimes produces bioluminescence. The bioluminescence may lure small animals to the gulper eel the same way the anglerfish’s lure does. It’s possible that the gulper eel sometimes hangs in the deep water with its long tail curved up over its head, waiting for prey to approach, but for the most part it’s an active hunter of small crustaceans and other animals.

You may remember from other episodes that most deep-sea animals can’t see the color red. Some predatory fish, including a species of dragon fish, use that to their advantage by emitting red light that they can see but their prey can’t. It’s possible that the gulper eel’s tail emits red light to help it find groups of the tiny crustaceans it mostly eats. It has very small eyes and we don’t even know if it can see the color red or not. We also don’t know if its bioluminescent tail also gives off other light wavelengths that would act as a lure to small animals, or if it uses its caudal appendage to communicate with other gulper eels.

The gulper eel lives in many of the world’s oceans, especially in tropical areas, in depths up to 9,800 feet, or 3,000 meters. Sometimes it lives in shallower water too. Because it lives so deep most of the time, we don’t know a whole lot about it. Luckily, in the last few years scientists have learned a lot more about it from deep-sea rover observations.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 442: Trees and Megafauna

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Further reading:

The Trees That Miss the Mammoths

The disappearance of mastodons still threatens the native forests of South America

Study reveals ancient link between mammoth dung and pumpkin pie

A mammoth, probably about to eat something:

The Osage orange fruit looks like a little green brain:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

Way back at the end of 2017, I found an article called “The Trees That Miss the Mammoths,” and made a Patreon episode about it. In episode 320, about elephants, which released in March of 2023, I cited a similar article connecting mammoths and other plants. Now there’s even more evidence that extinct megafauna and living plants are connected, so let’s have a full episode all about it.

Let’s start with the Kentucky coffeetree, which currently only survives in cultivation and in wetlands in parts of North America. It grows up to 70 feet high, or 21 meters, and produces leathery seed pods so tough that most animals literally can’t chew through them to get to the seeds. Its seed coating is so thick that water can’t penetrate it unless it’s been abraded considerably. Researchers are pretty sure the seed pods were eaten by mastodons and mammoths. Once the seeds traveled through a mammoth’s digestive system, they were nicely abraded and ready to sprout in a pile of dung.

There are five species of coffeetree, and the Kentucky coffeetree is the only one found in North America. The others are native to Asia, but a close relation grows in parts of Africa. It has similar tough seeds, which are eaten and spread by elephants.

The African forest elephant is incredibly important as a seed disperser. At least 14 species of tree need the elephant to eat their fruit in order for the seeds to sprout at all. If the forest elephant goes extinct, the trees will too.

When the North American mammoths went extinct, something similar happened. Mammoths and other megafauna co-evolved with many plants and trees to disperse their seeds, and in return the animals got to eat some yummy fruit. But when the mammoths went extinct, many plant seeds couldn’t germinate since there were no mammoths to eat the fruit and poop out the seeds. Some of these plants survive but have declined severely, like the Osage orange.

The Osage orange grows about 50 or 60 feet tall, or 15 to 18 meters, and produces big yellowish-green fruits that look like round greenish brains. Although it’s related to the mulberry, you wouldn’t be able to guess that from the fruit. The fruit drops from the tree and usually just sits there and rots. Some animals will eat it, especially cattle, but it’s not highly sought after by anything. Not anymore. In 1804, when the tree was first described by Europeans, it only grew in a few small areas in and near Texas. The tree mostly survives today because the plant can clone itself by sending up fresh sprouts from old roots.

But 10,000 years ago, the tree grew throughout North America, as far north as Ontario, Canada, and there were seven different species instead of just the one we have today. 10,000 years ago is about the time that much of the megafauna of North and South America went extinct, including mammoths, mastodons, giant ground sloths, elephant-like animals called gomphotheres, camels, and many, many others.

The osage orange tree’s thorns are too widely spaced to deter deer, but would have made a mammoth think twice before grabbing at the branches with its trunk. The thorns also grow much higher than deer can browse. Trees that bear thorns generally don’t grow them in the upper branches. There’s no point in wasting energy growing thorns where nothing is going to eat the leaves anyway. If there are thorns beyond reach of existing browsers, the tree must have evolved when something with a taller reach liked to eat its leaves.

The term “evolutionary anachronism” is used to describe aspects of a plant, like the Osage orange’s thorns and fruit, that evolved due to pressures of animals that are now extinct. Scientists have observed evolutionary anachronism plants throughout the world. For instance, the lady apple tree, which grows in northern Australia and parts of New Guinea. It can grow up to 66 feet tall, or 20 meters, and produces an edible red fruit with a single large seed. It’s a common tree these days, probably because the Aboriginal people ate the fruit, but before that, a bird called genyornis was probably the main seed disperser of the lady apple.

In episode 217 we talked about the genyornis, a flightless Australian bird that went extinct around 50,000 years ago but possibly more recently. It grew around 7 feet tall, or over 2 meters, and recent studies suggest it ate a lot of water plants. It would have probably eaten the lady apple fruit whenever it could, most likely swallowing the fruits whole and pooping the big seeds out later.

Way back in episode 19 we talked about a tree on the island of Mauritius that relied on the dodo’s digestive system to abrade its seeds so they could sprout. It turns out that study was flawed and the seeds don’t need to be abraded to sprout. They just need an animal to eat the flesh off the seed, either by just eating the fruit and leaving the seed behind, or by swallowing the entire fruit and pooping the seed out later, and that could have been done by any number of animals. The dodo probably did eat the fruits, but so did a lot of other animals that have also gone extinct on Mauritius.

In June of 2025, a study was published showing that the gomphothere Notiomastodon, which lived in South America until about 10,000 years ago, definitely ate fruit. Notiomastodon was an elephant relation that could probably grow almost ten feet tall, or 3 meters. It probably lived in family groups like modern elephants and probably looked a lot like a modern elephant, at least if you’re not an elephant expert or an elephant yourself. The 2025 study examined a lot of notiomastodon teeth, and it discovered evidence that the animals ate a lot of fruit. This means it would have been an important seed disperser, just like the African forest elephant that we talked about earlier.

Another plant that nearly went extinct after the mammoth did is a surprising one. Wild ancestors of modern North American squash plants relied on mammoths to disperse their seeds and create the type of habitat where the plants thrived. Mammoths probably behaved a lot like modern elephants, pulling down tree limbs to eat and sometimes pushing entire trees over. This disturbed land is what wild squash plants loved, and if you’ve ever prepared a pumpkin or squash you’ll know that it’s full of seeds. The wild ancestors of these modern cultivated plants didn’t have delicious fruits, though, at least not to human taste buds. The fruit contained toxins that made them bitter, which kept small animals from eating them. Small animals would chew up the seeds instead of swallowing them whole, which is not what the plants needed. But mammoths weren’t bothered by the toxins and in fact probably couldn’t even taste the bitterness. They thought these wild squash were delicious and they ate a lot of them.

After the mammoth went extinct, the wild squash lost its main seed disperser. As forests grew thicker after mammoths weren’t around to keep the trees open, the squash also lost a lot of its preferred habitat. The main reason why we have pumpkins and summer squash is because of our ancient ancestors. They bred for squash that weren’t bitter, and they planted them and cared for the plants. So even though the main cause of the mammoth’s extinction was probably overhunting by ancient humans, at least we got pumpkin pies out of the whole situation. However, I personally would prefer to have both pumpkin pie and mammoths.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 441: Mean Birds

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Thanks to Maryjane and Siya for their suggestions this week!

Further reading:

Look, don’t touch: birds with dart frog poison in their feathers found in New Guinea

The hooded pitohui:

The rufous-naped bellbird:

The regent whistler:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

This week we’re going to learn about some birds that by human standards seem pretty mean, although of course the birds are just being birds. Thanks to Maryjane and Siya for their suggestions this week!

We’ll start with Maryjane’s suggestion, the Northern shrike. It lives in North America, spending winter in parts of Canada and the northern United States. In summer it migrates to northern Canada. It’s a lovely gray and black bird with a dark eye streak, white markings on its tail and wings that flash when it flies, and a hooked bill. It’s a strong bird about the size of an American robin, and both the male and female sing. They will sometimes imitate other bird songs, and during breeding season a pair will sing duets. The Northern shrike looks very similar to the loggerhead shrike that lives farther south, in the southern parts of Canada and throughout most of the United States and Mexico.

Most important to us today, the Northern shrike is sometimes called the butcher bird, because in the olden days, butchers would hang meat up to cure–but we’ll get to that part.

It prefers to live in the edges of a forest near open spaces, and in the summer it lives along the border of the boreal forest and tundra. While it’s just a little songbird, in its heart it’s a falcon or hawk. It eats a lot of insects and other invertebrates, especially in summer, but it mainly kills and eats other songbirds and small mammals like mice and lemmings, even ones that are bigger and heavier than it is.

The shrike has ordinary feet for a perching bird, not talons, but its feet are strong and can hold onto struggling prey. Its beak is deadly to small animals. The bill has a sharp hook at the end and is notched so that it has two little projections that act like fangs. It will hover and drop onto its prey, or grab a bird in mid-flight and bear it to the ground to kill it. Sometimes it will hop along the ground until it startles a bird or insect into flying away. It will even flash the white patches on its wings to frighten hidden prey into moving.

If the shrike kills a wasp or bee, it will remove the stinger before eating it. It will pick off the wings of large insects and will sometime beat a dead insect against a rock or branch to soften it up and break off parts of the hard exoskeleton before eating it.

Shrikes are territorial and will chase away birds that are much bigger than them, like ducks and even geese. During nesting season, the female takes care of the eggs and the male provides food for her. To prove that he can provide lots of food for the female while she’s incubating the eggs, he will cache food throughout his territory in advance. This is something shrikes do anyway, but it’s especially important during nesting season.

If a shrike catches an animal it doesn’t want to eat right away, it will store it for later. It will cram it into a crack in a rock, impale it on a thorn or other sharp item like the points of a barbed wire fence, or wedge it into the fork of a tree branch. Then it can come back and eat it in a day or two when it’s hungry, or take the food to its mate.

When the eggs hatch, both parents help feed the babies. When the babies are old enough to leave the nest, the parents go their separate ways, but they will often each take some of the fledglings with them so they can continue to feed them and help them learn to hunt. Since a nest can have as many as nine babies, it’s not always possible for one parent to take all the babies. The siblings stick together even once they’re mostly grown and independent, often through their first winter.

This is what a Northern shrike sounds like:

[Northern shrike call]

We talked about some poisonous birds in episode 222, but Siya wanted to learn more about them. In that episode we mostly talked about the hooded pitohui, but since then, two more poisonous birds have been discovered in New Guinea.

Let’s refresh our memories about the hooded pitohui, mostly because its discovery by scientists is such a fun story.

The hooded pitohui lives in forests throughout much of New Guinea and eats seeds, insects and other invertebrates, and fruit. It’s related to orioles and looks very similar, with a dark orange body and black wings, head, and tail. It’s a social songbird that lives in family groups where everyone works to help raise the babies.

The people who live in New Guinea knew all about its toxicity, of course. They mentioned this to European naturalists as long ago as 1895, but weren’t believed, because the scientists had never heard of a toxic bird. It wasn’t until 1989 that a grad student studying birds of paradise made a surprising discovery.

Jack Dumbacher was trying to net some birds of paradise to study but kept catching pitohuis in his nets. He would untangle the birds and let them fly away, but naturally they were upset and one scratched him. He was in a hurry so he just licked the cuts clean. His tongue started to tingle, then burn, and then it went numb.

Fortunately the effects didn’t last long, but he mentioned it to another researcher who had had a similar experience. They realized something weird was going on, so Dumbacher asked some of the local people what the cause might be. They all said, “Yeah, don’t lick the pitohui bird.”

Dumbacher did, though, because sometimes scientists have to lick things. The next time his nets caught a pitohui, Dumbacher plucked one of its feathers and put it in his mouth. His mouth immediately started to burn.

Dumbacher was amazed to learn about a toxic bird, but it took a year for anyone else to take an interest, specifically Dr. John W. Daly, an expert in poison dart frogs in Central and South America. Back in the 1960s while he was studying the frogs, in order to determine which ones were actually toxic and which ones weren’t, he frequently poked a frog and licked his finger, so Daly completely understood Dumbacher putting a feather in his mouth.

Maybe don’t put random stuff in your mouth. Both Dumbacher and Daly were lucky they didn’t die, because it turns out that poison dart frogs and pitohuis both contain one of the deadliest neurotoxins in the world, called batrachotoxin.

A chemical analysis determined that both animals excrete the same toxin. In captivity, poison dart frogs lose their toxicity. Daly was the one who figured this out, but he couldn’t figure out why except that he was pretty sure they absorbed the toxins from something they were eating in the wild. He thought the same might be true for the pitohui.

Dumbacher agreed, and after he achieved his doctorate he started making expeditions to New Guinea to try to find out what. Both he and Daly thought it was probably an insect. But there are a lot of insects in Papua New Guinea and he couldn’t stay there and test insects for toxins all the time. He came and went as often as he could, and to make his trips easier he left his equipment in a village rather than hauling it back and forth with him.

What he didn’t know is that one villager, named Avit Wako, had gotten interested in the project. When Dumbacher was gone, he continued the experiments. In 1995 Dumbacher sent a student intern to the village, since he didn’t have time to go himself, and Avit Wako said, “Hey, good to see you! I solved your problem. The toxin comes from this particular kind of beetle.” He was right, too. The toxin comes from beetles in the genus Choresine.

But the pitohui isn’t the only toxic bird in New Guinea. In 2018 and 2019, two researchers from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark got interested in poisonous birds and did some studies. One of the scientists is Kasun Bodawatta, whose colleagues thought he was having a rough time during the trip. The life of a scientist in the field can be hard, and Bodawatta kept having issues with a runny nose and weepy eyes. It wasn’t allergies or exhaustion, though, but the result of handling poisonous birds and their feathers. He described it as feeling “like cutting onions, but with a nerve agent.”

Bodawatta’s team discovered that two more birds in New Guinea contain the same toxins as the pitohui in their feathers and skin. The rufous-naped bellbird is gray-brown with white and yellow markings, and a patch of rufous on the back of its head. The regent whistler is black and yellow with a white patch on its throat. Both eat insects as a large part of their diets, and both show similar genetic mutations that allow them to sequester the Choresine toxins in their feathers and skin. Not only does this keep potential predators from eating the birds, it also probably helps kill mites and other parasites that might otherwise want to live in their feathers.

A 2023 study on the birds’ toxins discovered something new. In addition to the neurotoxin the birds absorb from beetles, the regent whistler’s skin also contains a different toxin that doesn’t have anything to do with beetles or other insects. The regent whistler’s skin glands contain a population of symbiotic bacteria that secrete a completely different toxin made of previously unknown molecules. The toxin helps protect the birds from harmful bacteria and fungi that are known to infect the skin and feathers of birds.

In 2024, a team of microbiologists and chemists began studying the antimicrobial secretions in hopes of creating a new type of antimicrobial drug for use in humans and other animals. So thank you, little birds, and thank you to the scientists and citizen scientists who study them.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 433: Flamingos and Two Weird Friends

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Thanks to Ryder, Alexandria, and Simon for their suggestions this week! Let’s learn about three remarkable wading birds. Two of them are pink!

Bird sounds taken from the excellent website xeno-canto.

The goliath heron is as tall as people [picture by Steve Garvie from Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland – Goliath Heron (Ardea goliath), CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12223810]:

The roseate spoonbill has a bill shaped like a spoon, you may notice [picture by Photo Dante – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=42301356]:

Flamingos really do look like those lawn ornaments [picture by Valdiney Pimenta – Flamingos, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6233369]:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

This week we’re going to learn about three large birds with long legs that spend a lot of time wading through shallow water, suggested by Ryder, Alexandria, and Simon.

Wading birds tend to share traits even if they’re not closely related, because of convergent evolution. In order to wade in water deep enough to find food, a wading bird needs long legs. Then it also needs a long neck so it can reach its food more easily. A long beak helps to grab small animals too. Having big feet with long toes also helps it keep its footing in soft mud.

Let’s start with Ryder’s suggestion, the goliath heron. It’s the biggest heron alive today, standing up to 5 feet tall, or 1.5 meters. That’s as tall as a person! It only weighs about 11 lbs at most, though, or 5 kg, but its wingspan is over 7 ½ feet across, or 2.3 meters. It’s a big, elegant bird with a mostly gray and brown body, but a chestnut brown head and neck with black and white streaks on its throat and chest.

The goliath heron lives throughout much of sub-Saharan Africa, meaning south of the Sahara Desert, anywhere it can find water. It’s happy on the edge of a lake or river, in a swamp or other wetlands, around the edges of a water hole, or even along the coast of the ocean. It usually stands very still in the water, looking down. When a fish swims close enough, the heron stabs it with its bill, pulls it out of the water, and either holds it for a while until the bird is ready to swallow the fish, or sometimes it will even set the fish down on land or floating vegetation for a while. It’s not usually in a big hurry to swallow its meal. Sometimes that means other birds steal the fish, especially eagles and pelicans, but the goliath heron is so big and its beak is so sharp that most of the time, other birds and animals leave it alone.

The goliath heron will also eat frogs, lizards, and other small animals when it can, but it prefers nice big fish. It can catch much bigger fish than other wading birds, and eating big fish is naturally more energy efficient than eating small ones. If a goliath heron only catches two big fish a day, it’s had enough to eat without having to expend a lot of energy hunting.

This is what a goliath heron sounds like:

[goliath heron call]

Alexandria’s suggestion, the roseate spoonbill, is also a big wading bird, but it’s very different from the goliath heron. For one thing, it’s pink and white and has a long bill that’s flattened and spoon-shaped at the end. It’s only about half the size of a goliath heron, with a wingspan over 4 feet across, or 1.3 meters, and a height of about 2 ½ feet, or 80 cm. That’s still a big bird! It mostly lives in South America east of the Andes mountain range, but it’s also found in coastal areas in Central America up through the most southern parts of North America.

Unlike the goliath heron, which is solitary, the roseate spoonbill is social and spends time in small flocks as it hunts for food. It likes shallow coastal water, swamps, and other wetlands where it can find it preferred food. That isn’t fish, although it will eat little fish like minnows when it catches them. It mainly eats crustaceans like crabs and crayfish, along with frogs, aquatic insects, and mollusks, and some seeds and other plant material. Since most of its food lives on the floor of the waterway or hidden in mud or water plants, the spoonbill usually can’t see its prey. It depends on the sensitive nerves in its bill to know the difference between, say, a crab and a crab-shaped rock. It walks through shallow water, sweeping its bill back and forth through the mud at the bottom, and grabs any little animal it can. Other birds like egrets will sometimes follow foraging spoonbills so they can catch any animals that the spoonbills miss.

Baby spoonbills are born with ordinary pointy bills, but as the chicks mature, the ends of their beaks flatten and become more and more spoon-shaped. If the goliath heron’s bill is like a pair of kitchen knives, the spoonbill’s beak is like a set of salad tongs that can scoop up lots of salad and dressing at once.

The roseate spoonbill gets its pink coloration from the food it eats. A lot of crustaceans contain carotenoid pigments, which the spoonbill absorbs and expresses in its feathers.

There are other spoonbills in the world, but the roseate spoonbill is the only one found in the Americas. The other five species live in Africa and Madagascar, Australia and New Zealand, and much of Europe and Asia. All the other species are white with black, yellow, or pink facial markings. Only the roseate spoonbill is all pink.

This is what the roseate spoonbill sounds like:

[roseate spoonbill call]

Simon’s suggestion is another pink bird that you’ve undoubtedly heard of, the flamingo! It lives in parts of South America, Central and southern North America, Africa, southern Europe and the Middle East, and southwest Asia. The two most well-known and widespread species are the greater and lesser flamingos. The greater flamingo is the biggest, standing over 4 ½ feet tall, or 1.4 meters. That’s still not as tall as the goliath heron, although it’s close. Its wingspan can be five feet across, or 1.5 meters.

The flamingo is kind of a weird bird, even by wading bird standards. It rests by standing on one leg, which it can do without falling over and without expending any energy to keep itself upright. It can even sleep while standing on one leg. People are really good at walking on long legs, but it’s a lot harder for us to stand on one leg without swaying and eventually falling over when our muscles tire. On the other hand, we weigh a lot more than a flamingo, which is barely over 7 ½ lbs in weight, or 3.5 kg.

The most unusual aspect of the flamingo is its beak. It’s thick and famously bent downward halfway along its length, so that it’s shaped sort of like a boomerang. There’s really no way to describe it as a type of kitchen implement unless it’s a strainer basket, because that’s how the flamingo uses its beak.

The flamingo eats tiny animals like brine shrimp and other small crustaceans, insect larvae, and even algae, and it catches all these tiny foods by sifting them from the water with its beak. The beak is lined with lamellae, which look like little hairs or the teeth of a comb, and its tongue is rough. It lowers its head on its long neck until its head is actually upside down, scoops its beak back and forth through the water, and uses its tongue to push the water out through the lamellae. Whatever algae or tiny animals are left in its mouth, it swallows.

Flamingos are extremely social and live in huge flocks, sometimes consisting of thousands of birds. The female only lays a single egg in her mud nest, and both parents take care of the baby by feeding it crop milk. This isn’t actually milk but is a nutritious substance produced by glands in the throat and crop. Emperor penguins, pigeons, and doves are the only other birds known that produce crop milk for their babies. Flamingo chicks have ordinary straight beaks that develop the bend as they grow older.

Like the roseate spoonbill, the flamingo’s pink coloration is due to its diet. The algae it eats contains a lot of carotenoids, as do the brine shrimp it eats. The American flamingo tends to be the pinkest overall, but all flamingos are pink if they’re eating enough foods that contain these carotenoids.

This is what an American flamingo flock sounds like:

[flamingo call]

There are lots more wading birds than the ones we’ve covered here, and not all of them have long legs and long necks. Just, you know, the best ones do.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!