Category Archives: North America

Episode 449: The Gloucester Sea Serpent

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This is a chapter of the Beyond Bigfoot and Nessie book, which you can buy or request at the library!

Further reading:

Debunking a Great New England Sea Serpent

A narwhal. I use this picture all the time:

The diseased black snake that was taken for a baby sea serpent:

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to have a sea monster episode! This is actually a chapter of the book that I published a few years ago now, Beyond Bigfoot and Nessie, and it’s called the Gloucester Sea Serpent. We had a Patreon episode recently that was about a different sea serpent, and while I was researching that, it was driving me completely nuts, because I kept trying to find the episode where I talked about the Gloucester sea serpent, and I finally remembered that that wasn’t an episode at all. It was just a chapter in the book. Maybe it’s time to record it.

While the Gloucester sea serpent was first mentioned in a traveler’s journal in 1638, it really came to prominence almost two centuries later. On August 6, 1817, two women said they’d seen a sea monster in the Cape Ann harbor. A fisherman said he’d seen it too, but neither the fisherman nor the women were believed. A 60-foot, or 18-meter, sea serpent in the harbor? Ridiculous!

Only a few days later, though, the monster started showing up in Gloucester Bay and attracted major attention—not because it was elusive, but because it was so commonly seen. Sailors, fishers, and even people on shore saw what was described as a huge serpent in the waters of Gloucester Bay, Massachusetts, in the northeastern United States. On one occasion more than two hundred people watched it for nearly four hours.

The creature’s length was described as anywhere up to 150 feet long, or 46 meters, and many people said it had a horse-sized head. Some people described its head as being about the same shape as a horse’s too, although with a shorter snout. The body was snake-like and about the thickness of a barrel.

Many people thought the sea monster had humps along the back, usually referred to as bunches or occasionally joints. Others said it undulated through the water in an up-and-down motion, which looked like humps. Others said it had no bunches or humps at all. Most people agreed that its back was dark brown.

One of the earlier witnesses, a man named Amos Story, watched the sea serpent from shore for an hour and a half. He was adamant that it had no bunches, that he only saw at most about 12 feet of its length at one time, or 3.6 meters, and that its head resembled that of a sea turtle. It was also fast, with Story claiming it covered a mile in only three minutes or so. That’s about 20 miles per hour, or 32 kilometers per hour—an incredible speed for an animal in the water.

As it happens, the leatherback sea turtle has been recorded as swimming that fast, and it can grow over 7 feet long, or 2.2 meters, and possibly much longer. It lives throughout the world’s oceans and is just as happy in cold waters as it is in tropical waters. In other words, it’s possible Story actually saw a huge leatherback turtle, which would explain why it had a turtle-like head that it held above the surface of the water at least part of the time. This is something leatherback turtles do. Then again, the leatherback has distinctive ridges and serrations on its back that Story didn’t mention.

So many people reported seeing the sea serpent that the Linnaean Society of New England decided it needed to investigate. The society had only formed a few years before, in 1814, to promote natural history. By 1822 it had disbanded, but in those eight years it accomplished quite a bit, including opening a small museum in Boston. Its most controversial endeavor was the sea serpent investigation.

Members of the Linnaean Society interviewed witnesses, making careful notes that were signed by the interviewees to indicate the details were accurate. These statements tell us a lot about what people saw, although it hasn’t helped us determine what the sea serpent actually was.

For instance, Captain Solomon Allen saw the creature more than once and gave a clear description of it. It was at least 90 feet long, or 27.5 meters, with as many as fifty joints, or bunches. Its head was snake-like—specifically rattlesnake-like, presumably meaning it was wider at the back and had a narrower snout—but the size of a horse’s head. It was dark brown, plain in color, and swam with an undulating side-to-side motion. It dived by sinking straight down, moved quickly, and sometimes seemed to play in the water by swimming in circles.

All this is great information, but it doesn’t resemble any known animal. It also doesn’t necessarily resemble the other witness statements. Let’s go over some of the more detailed sightings and see if we can come to some conclusions.

A man named William Foster reported bunches along the monster’s length, although he also described them as rings. When the animal’s head rose from the water, the first thing Foster saw was what he described as a prong or spear. It was about a foot long, or 30 centimeters, and tapered to a point. His interviewer asked if the spear might have been a tongue, but Foster didn’t think so.

Three men on a schooner named the Laura, becalmed in the mouth of the harbor, witnessed the monster in late August. Sewall Toppan, master of the ship, reported that the monster’s head was the size of a 10-gallon keg, which would have been about 18 inches tall, or 46 centimeters, and 16 inches in diameter, or 40 centimeters. He said its head was held about 6 inches out of the water, or 15 centimeters, and that he could see 10 or 15 feet of its length disappearing into the water, or 3 to 4.5 meters. He didn’t see any kind of prong, but two of his sailors did.

One of the two sailors was Robert Bragg, who reported that the monster was swimming rapidly toward the ship with its head and about 15 feet of its body out of the water, or 4.5 meters. As it drew closer he saw its tongue, which he described as looking like a harpoon about 2 feet long, or 61 centimeters. He even reported that the animal raised its tongue almost straight up several times. He also said it was dark brown and smooth.

The third Laura witness, helmsman William Somerby, corroborated Bragg’s details, including the animal’s tongue, which he mentioned was light brown. As the monster passed within 40 feet of the ship, or 12 meters, Somerby even saw one of its eyes clearly. He said it was the size of an ox’s eye and was completely dark brown or possibly black. He and Bragg both noted that the animal had a bunch above its eyes, presumably meaning a bump or knob of some kind.

All three men said that they were familiar with whales and the animal was not a whale.

August 14 was a warm day and the water was calm. A man named Matthew Gaffney, a ship’s carpenter by trade but in his heart a monster hunter, borrowed a boat and took his brother and a friend with him to row. He also took a musket.

As the small boat approached cautiously, the monster was spiraling around in the water, as various people reported it doing on and off throughout the day. Gaffney waited until the boat was as close as it could safely approach without risking being capsized, then fired a shot at the monster’s head.

He was a good marksman and was certain he hit the animal, which sank immediately below the surface and vanished. Worried that the wounded monster would be enraged once its initial shock wore off, Gaffney and all the other boats on the harbor took off for shore. But when the sea monster resurfaced some distance off, it was obviously unbothered by being shot at. It continued its apparently playful circling around in the harbor.

Several witnesses who saw the monster on August 14, before and after Gaffney’s attempt to shoot it, gave statements. William H. Foster said it at first moved slowly, but then sped up and twisted and turned through the water. Sometimes its head would bend around toward its tail, and Foster specifically said that when that happened, parts of its body between the bunches would raise up as much as 8 inches out of the water, or 20 centimeters, showing that the animal was at least 40 feet long, or 12 meters.

Lonson Nash saw the sea serpent and reported that it moved quickly and left a long wake, and that while it swam underwater sometimes, it didn’t seem to be very far under. He could track its progress underwater by the disturbance it made on the surface. He also saw it double around so that its head was sometimes near its tail, but he mentioned that when it was swimming forward, it appeared perfectly straight.

Later that day, a shipmaster named Epes Ellery saw the monster’s head through a spyglass. He reported that it was flattened on top like a snake’s and that its mouth resembled a snake’s mouth—presumably meaning it had a thin lower jaw. He reported that its joints were the size of two-gallon kegs and rose about 6 inches above the surface, or 15 centimeters. He said the animal swam with a vertical motion, not a side-to-side motion.

An unnamed woman reported that the sea monster’s bunches looked like gallon kegs tied in a line. Another man said he saw the creature’s bunches at the surface as it lay still for a while, and that around 50 feet, or 15 meters, of its length was visible although he couldn’t see its head or tail. Other witnesses that same day reported much the same thing.

Captain Elkanah Finney saw the sea monster from shore later in August, after his son reported seeing something strange in the harbor. Finney first thought it was a bunch of seaweed, but when he looked at it through his spyglass he realized it was an animal moving quickly through the water. He said it might have been 100 feet long, or 30 meters, with 30 or 40 bunches down its length. In fact, he said it looked like a string of buoys and that each bunch was about the size of a barrel.

There are lots of other reports, all of them similar to these. The sea monster, whatever it was, spent a lot of time in and around Gloucester Bay that summer and even returned the following two summers. People were obviously seeing something. The question is what.

Let’s look at the sightings where the monster had a prong or that it stuck out a long, straight tongue. This sounds a lot like a narwhal. A narwhal can grow up to about 18 feet long, or 5.5 meters, and males, and some females, have a brown or brownish spiral tusk that can grow just over 10 feet long, or 3 meters. Many people think the narwhal’s tusk is a horn that sticks up from its forehead, but it’s actually an elongated tooth that grows through the upper lip. That would explain why some of the witnesses thought it was a tongue.

A young narwhal is black or dark brown, although it grows lighter throughout its life so that old narwhals are almost white. A young animal would also have a short tusk. A narwhal often swims with its head out of the water and a male will sometimes lift his tusk up and down in the air. He can do this easily because, unlike most whales, the narwhal’s neck vertebrae aren’t fused and can bend the head around.

Most importantly, the narwhal is an Arctic animal and isn’t typically found as far south as Massachusetts, although it’s certainly been seen in that part of the ocean on rare occasions. Its rareness, together with its odd appearance compared to other whales, might lead witnesses to think it wasn’t a whale at all but some kind of monster.

That doesn’t explain the bunches, though. The witnesses on the schooner Laura didn’t report seeing any bunches on their sea monster (whose “tongue” reportedly looked like a harpoon), but William Foster’s pronged sea monster did have bunches.

Some researchers have dismissed the bunches, or humps, as a string of narwhals or other small whales traveling in a line. That’s definitely a possibility, but too many witnesses described the bunches as being always partially out of the water, not moving up and down. Not only that, the bunches were seen when the sea monster was lying quietly on the placid surface, not moving, often for long stretches.

Remember, though, that many witnesses described the bunches as resembling a line of buoys or kegs tied on a line. The animal often seemed to swim in circles until its head nearly touched its tail. William Foster reported that when it did this, its body between the bunches would rise several inches out of the water. Lonson Nash said when it was swimming forward, its body appeared perfectly straight.

Maybe witnesses weren’t seeing a long serpentine animal with bumps along its back. Maybe they were seeing a string of kegs used as buoys to keep fishing nets afloat, that had become tangled around a small whale’s tail.

Small kegs or large pieces of cork were sometimes used for this purpose at the time, including in Newfoundland and Norway. If a net tangled around a narwhal’s tail, the animal might have become used to dragging its burden around until the net eventually rotted away and freed the whale. This is something that still happens to whales today with nets and other fishing gear, although these days the nets are all plastic and won’t rot.

Narwhals mostly eat fish and squid, and often dive deeply to find food along the ocean floor. Our entangled narwhal chasing fish underwater might appear to be traveling in playful circles as the net dragged along behind and above it. Pulling all the buoys underwater would probably be difficult for the whale, which would explain why it mostly stayed near the surface.

It’s not a perfect match, of course, but the tangled-narwhal hypothesis fits a lot of the details reported for the Gloucester sea serpent. Narwhals also often travel in small groups, so if the entangled narwhal was with a few friends, that would explain why not every witness saw the bunches.

As for the Linnaean Society of New England, their investigation of the sea monster was excellent for the time. They took the sightings seriously and tried to remain impartial, although the members did seem to start from an assumption that the animal was an actual serpent of some kind.

Unfortunately, they made one fatal blunder. In late September 1817, someone found and killed a snake 3.5 feet long, or a little over a meter, that had bunches all down its spine. It was found only a few miles from Gloucester Harbor. The Linnaean Society decided it had to be a baby sea serpent.

They said so loudly and even proposed a scientific name for the sea serpent. But it wasn’t long before the “baby sea serpent” was identified as a common black snake. The body was dissected and the bunches turned out to be tumors from a diseased spine. The society’s investigation became a joke. But at least we still have the eyewitness accounts they gathered.

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 448: Tennessee water mysteries

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While I’m at Dragon Con, here’s an old Patreon episode about Tennessee water mysteries, including some spooky sightings of what were probably bears, and some mystery fish!

Show transcript:

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

As this episode goes live, I should be at Dragon Con, so I decided to go ahead and schedule an old Patreon episode to run instead of trying to get a new episode ready in time. It’s about some water mysteries in my home state of Tennessee, although I actually just moved away from Tennessee to Georgia.

Tennessee is in the southeastern United States, a long thin state divided into three geographical sections. East Tennessee borders the southern Appalachian Mountains, Middle Tennessee is on the Cumberland Plateau, and West Tennessee borders the Mississippi River. The only natural lake in the state is Reelfoot in northwestern Tennessee, a shallow, swampy body of water formed in the early 19th century.

Before 1811, instead of a lake a small river flowed through the area, a tributary of the Mississippi. In earlier accounts, Reelfoot River is called Red Foot River. Most of the residents of the area at the time were Choctaw, although white settlers lived in the small town of New Madrid near the bank of the Mississippi.

From December 1811 through February 1812, a series of earthquakes in the New Madrid Seismic Zone changed the land radically. There were three main quakes and innumerable smaller ones, ranging from an estimated 6.7 for the smallest quake to a possible 8.8 for the largest.

In the initial quake and aftershocks on 16 December 1811, chimneys collapsed, trees fell, and fissures opened and closed, projecting water or sand high in the air. Boats on the Mississippi capsized as huge waves crashed from bank to bank.

A woman named Eliza Bryan, who lived in New Madrid, wrote an account of the quakes:

On the 16th of December, 1811, about 2 o’clock a.m., a violent shock of earthquake, accompanied by a very awful noise, resembling loud but distant thunder, but hoarse and vibrating, followed by complete saturation of the atmosphere with sulphurous vapor, causing total darkness. The screams of the inhabitants, the cries of the fowls and beasts of every species, the falling trees, and the roaring of the Mississippi, the current of which was retrograde for a few minutes, owing, as it is supposed, to an eruption in its bed, formed a scene truly horrible.

From this time on until the 4th of February the earth was in continual agitation, visibly waving as a gentle sea. On that day there was another shock…and on the 7th, at about 4 o’clock a.m., a concussion took place so much more violent than those preceding it that it is denominated the ‘hard shock.’

The Mississippi first seemed to recede from its banks, and its waters gathered up like a mountain… Then, rising 15 or 20 feet perpendicularly and expanding, as it were, at the same time, the banks overflowed with a retrograde current rapid as a torrent.

A riverboat captain reported in another account that his boat was caught in a ferocious current on the Mississippi, crashing across waves he estimated as six feet high, or 1.8 m. He also reported whirlpools that he estimated were 30 feet deep, or 9 m. He saw all the trees on either bank fall at once.

The December quake was so large it was felt across North America, from Canada to the Gulf Coast. Then, only five weeks later, it happened again, followed by the third major earthquake on 7 February. Only 15 miles, or 24 km, from the epicenter, the land dropped 20 feet, or 6 m, and created a basin that immediately filled with water. Reelfoot Lake was formed, Tennessee’s only natural lake.

Reelfoot is a state park these days, popular with boaters, fishers, hunters, and birdwatchers. The only cryptid sighting I could find took place in the Glass community near Obion, within ten miles, or 16 km, of the lake. A man who grew up in Glass reported in 2009 that a bipedal creature 8 or 9 feet tall, or 2.5-2.7 m, and covered in off-white hair was well-known to the residents of the community. They referred to it as “the white thing.” The man had seen it several times as a child and his father, who was initially a skeptic, changed his mind when he found huge tracks in the woods.

Technically, Tennessee has two natural lakes, but the “Lost Sea” is underground. It’s located in a large cave system called Craighead Caverns in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains. It’s one of the largest underground lakes ever found, although it hasn’t been fully explored so its actual size isn’t known. The lake doesn’t support any known animals, although scientific explorations haven’t been conducted as far as I could find. In the 1960s the cave owners stocked the lake with rainbow trout in hopes that they would discover an exit to the surface. They didn’t, and the fish have to be fed and restocked since they have no natural food sources and won’t spawn in the lake. The cave, and the lake, are a local tourist attraction.

Besides Reelfoot Lake, Tennessee is home to many man-made lakes. Most are in East Tennessee. During the Great Depression, President Roosevelt set up the New Deal plan, creating government-funded projects to employ out-of-work Americans. The Tennessee Valley Authority was founded in 1933 to improve the lives of people who lived along the Tennessee River and its tributaries. To curb seasonal flooding and stop the spread of malaria, and to bring electricity to residents, TVA built numerous hydroelectric dams.

I grew up in a town built in the 1930s to house workers on Norris Dam, which formed Norris Lake from the Clinch River. Norris Dam was TVA’s first large project, completed in 1936. This makes the lake only 85 years old, but that’s certainly long enough for local lore to grow up around it. As a kid I heard about monster catfish—as big as a VW Beetle—living at the bottom of the spillway. The largest fish ever caught in the lake, however, was a 49.5 pound, or 22.45 kg, striped bass in 1978. The largest catfish ever caught in Tennessee was a blue catfish that weighed 112 pounds, or 50.8 kg. That’s huge, but not the size of a car.

There are other strange reports from around Norris Lake. On the night of 3 March 2012, two men went to a clearing near the first man’s house, in a swampy area near the lake’s edge, to build a bonfire and talk. They noticed footsteps and the sound of a large animal moving around in the trees nearby but assumed it was a white-tailed deer, although both men did have the sensation of being watched throughout the evening. Around midnight, when the men decided to leave, they heard sticks breaking in the trees as though being stepped on. One of the men knocked on a tree with a piece of wood and heard knocking in response, and then both were frightened by a loud, deep, long growl.

Black bears do occasionally stray into the Norris area from the nearby Smoky Mountains, but black bears don’t growl—they make distinctive moaning or chuffing noises instead. They also usually stay away from humans and fire.

In the late 1980s, possibly September of 1988, a woman returning to her car after a day of fishing with her family saw a huge hairy Bigfoot-type figure cross the trail ahead of her at speed. She only caught a quick glimpse of it at dusk but estimated it was 8 or 9 feet tall, or 2.5-2.7 m, with long arms that swung oddly as it took huge strides.

Other Tennessee lakes have their share of mysteries too. The “catzilla” legend is repeated in just about every waterway, with the catfish’s size usually compared to that of a small car. There really are some enormous fish in Tennessee’s lakes, though. In January of 2021 a man caught and released an American paddlefish in Cherokee Lake that might have approached the world record weight of 151 pounds, or 68.5 kg. It was six feet long, or 1.8 m.

There’s also a 19th century mystery associated with the Tennessee River. The earliest report of it I could find is from April 1878 in the Chattanooga Daily Times, an account from an old resident about river monster sightings from earlier that century. The first sighting by a white settler is from 1822, when a man named Buck Sutton was fishing and sighted the monster. The next reported sighting was near the same area five years later, when a man named Billy Burns saw the monster while crossing the ferry. Jim Windom was fishing in 1829 when he saw it. All three men died the summer after their encounters, although subsequent sightings (including 1836 and 1839) didn’t lead to anyone’s death.

The sightings all apparently took place in a part of the Tennessee River near Chattanooga, now dammed to form Chickamauga Lake. At the time the river there was relatively sluggish and shallow, with many shoals.

The monster was described as serpent-like and about the length of a canoe, or around 20 to 25 feet long, or 6 to 7.6 m. At least one report says it had a doglike head. Billy Burns reported that its belly was yellow and its back was blue. The most interesting detail comes from at least two reports, that of a tall black fin on its back that stood at least 18 inches high, or 45 cm, or possibly two feet high, or 61 cm.

The Tennessee River has its share of unusual animals, from tiny freshwater jellyfish to the paddlefish, a filter feeder with an elongated rostrum, but nothing with such a large and prominent dorsal fin. The lake sturgeon, which can grow well over seven feet long, or 2.2 m, has bony plates on its back and an elongated snout, which doesn’t fit the description given by witnesses. The alligator gar can grow 10 feet long, or 3 m, but like the lake sturgeon, its dorsal fin is small and set far back on the body. The longnose gar can grow six feet long, or 1.8 m, but again, its dorsal fin is small and set far back on its body, and as its name implies, its jaws are elongated.

In shallow water the tail fins of any of these fish or others can show above the surface higher than the dorsal fin, but not two feet out of the water. Moreover, all these fish were much more common in the early 19th century than they are now, and locals would likely recognize all of them.

Alligators do occasionally show up in Tennessee, although not historically. Most alligator sightings are quite recent. The American alligator can grow up to 15 feet long, or 4.5 m, but even if one occasionally strayed into the Tennessee River in the 19th century, it has no structure on its back that could be mistaken for a tall fin.

On rare occasions, a bull shark could find its way into the Tennessee River. The Tennessee is a tributary of the Ohio River, which in turns flows into the Mississippi, which then empties into the Gulf of Mexico. While bull sharks do occasionally swim up the Mississippi, no genuine sighting of one in the Ohio or Tennessee rivers has ever been documented. It’s not impossible, though. An exceptionally large bull shark can grow up to 13 feet long, or 4 m, and it prefers shallow water. Tennesseans in the early 19th century would have no knowledge of sharks and might consider it a monster, not an ordinary fish.

It’s possible that the Tennessee River was once home to a large fish with a tall dorsal fin, one that was already rare in the early 19th century and which went extinct soon after. It’s also possible that the story was just a newspaper hoax, written to fill space on a slow news day. The article from 1878 was a “contribution…from an old citizen of Chattanooga” who was not named, talking about events that took place more than fifty years before. In 1885 another newspaper, the Chattanooga Daily Commercial, ran a nearly identical article—obviously taken from the 1878 one, often word-for-word—that claims the reporter heard the story “yesterday while listening attentively to the conversation of one of Chattanooga’s oldest citizens.”

We may never know what the strange Tennessee River animal was, just as we may not know whether bigfoot-type creatures live near Tennessee’s lakes. I have my doubts that there are catfish in Tennessee bigger than cars, though—but just to be on the safe side, I’m staying in the boat.

Thanks for your support, and 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 440: Trilobites!

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Thanks to Micah for suggesting this week’s topic, the trilobite!

Further reading:

The Largest Trilobites

Stunning 3D images show anatomy of 500 million-year-old Cambrian trilobites entombed in volcanic ash

Strange Symmetries #06: Trilobite Tridents

Trilobite Ventral Structures

A typical trilobite:

Isotelus rex, the largest trilobite ever found [photo from the first link above]:

Walliserops showing off its trident [picture by TheFossilTrade – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=133758014]:

Another Walliserops individual with four prongs on its trident [photo by Daderot, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons]:

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to learn about an ancient animal that was incredibly successful for millions of years, until it wasn’t. It’s a topic suggested by Micah: the trilobite.

Trilobites first appear in the fossil record in the Cambrian, about 520 million years ago. They evolved separately from other arthropods so early and left no living descendants, that they’re not actually very closely related to any animals alive today. They were arthropods, though, so they’re distantly related to all other arthropods, including insects, spiders, and crustaceans.

The word trilobite means “three lobes,” which describes its basic appearance. It had a head shield, often with elaborate spikes depending on the species, and a little tail shield. In between, its body was segmented like a pillbug’s or an armadillo’s, so that it could flex without cracking its exoskeleton. Its body was also divided into three lobes running from head to tail. Its head and tail were usually rounded so that the entire animal was roughly shaped like an oval, with the head part of the oval larger than the tail part. It had legs underneath that it used to crawl around on the sea floor, burrow into sand and mud, and swim. Some species could even roll up into a ball to protect its legs and softer underside, just like a pillbug.

Because trilobites existed for at least 270 million years, there were a lot of species. Scientists have identified about 22,000 different species so far, and there were undoubtedly thousands more that we don’t know about yet. Most are about the size of a big stag beetle although some were tinier. The largest trilobite found so far lived in what is now North America, and it grew over two feet long, or more than 70 centimeters, and was 15 inches wide, or 40 cm. It’s named Isotelus rex.

I. rex had 26 pairs of legs, possibly more, and prominent eyes on the head shield. Scientists think it lived in warm, shallow ocean water like most other trilobites did, where it burrowed in the bottom and ate small animals like worms. There were probably other species of trilobite that were even bigger, we just haven’t found specimens yet that are more than fragments.

Because trilobites molted their exoskeletons the way modern crustaceans and other animals still do, we have a whole lot of fossilized exoskeletons. Fossilized legs, antennae, and other body parts are much rarer, and preserved soft body parts are the rarest of all. We know that some trilobite species had gills on the legs, some had hairlike structures on the legs, and many had compound eyes. A specimen with preserved eggs inside was also found recently.

Some incredibly detailed trilobite fossils have been found in Morocco, including details like the mouth and digestive tract. The detail comes from volcanic ash that fell into shallow coastal water around half a billion years ago. The water cooled the ash enough that when it fell onto the trilobites living in the water, it didn’t burn them. It did suffocate them, though, since so much ash fell that the ocean was more ash than water.

The ash was soft and as fine as powder, and it covered the trilobites and protected their bodies from potential damage, while also preserving the body details as they fossilized over millions of years. The fossils were discovered in 2015, about 509 million years after the trilobites died, and are still being studied.

Two species of trilobite have been found at this Morocco site, and the team is using non-invasive technology to study the preserved insides in one exceptionally preserved specimen. Its entire digestive system is intact, probably because the poor trilobite ended up swallowing a lot of ash before it died. The ash kept the soft tissues from decomposing.

Some trilobites had spines growing from their head shields and even from the rest of the exoskeleton. Scientists think these may have helped protect the animals from being eaten, but they might also have helped them navigate more easily in the water without getting flipped over by currents. One genus of trilobite, Walliserops, even had a structure sticking out from the front of its head called a trident.

The trident grew forward and slightly upward from the head, then split into three prongs. Scientists aren’t sure what it was for, but suggest that it acted as a nose spike like some modern beetles have, which allowed trilobites to fight each other for resources or mates. The tridents weren’t completely symmetrical, and one individual has even been found with a four-pronged trident. (I guess you would call that a quadrent.) Some species had long tridents, some short, but there’s no evidence that only males or only females had them.

Electron microscopes and other modern imaging technology have allowed scientists to learn more about what the trilobite looked like when it was alive. This includes some hints about different species’ coloration and markings. Most trilobites had good vision and were probably as colorful as modern crustaceans. Some rare trilobite fossils show microscopic traces of spots and stripes. One species studied may have had a brown stripe that faded to white along the edges of the body.

All trilobites went extinct at the end of the Permian, about 250 million years ago, during the extinction event called the Great Dying. We talked about it in detail in episode 227 so I won’t go over its causes and effects again except to say that an estimated 95% of all marine animals went extinct during that event. The Great Dying ended the trilobite’s successful 270 million year run on this amazing planet.

When I was little, I found trilobites fascinating. They were so common for so long, and then they were gone. I’ve always wondered if some trilobites survived the Great Dying and were still alive in the deep sea. I’m not the only one who’s wondered that, so let’s talk a little more about why the trilobites went extinct and how some of them might have survived.

Almost all trilobites we know of lived in shallow coastal water. We have trilobite tracks of an ancient low tide shore, which tells us that at least some species could leave the water and venture onto land occasionally, possibly the first animals on earth to do so. Coastal water is well oxygenated and we know trilobites had trouble surviving anoxic events, when the water where they lived had much less oxygen than usual. Anoxic events are actually what led to the Great Dying, but it wasn’t the first time the world’s oceans became less oxygenated. It happened in earlier extinction events too during the Devonian, around 372 and 359 million years ago, and each time many species and genera of trilobites went extinct. The trilobite was already in decline when the Great Dying occurred, with only a handful of genera left, and the extinction event finished them off once and for all according to the fossil record.

But we do know of a few species of trilobite that were adapted to the deep sea. Deep-sea animals have to evolve to be tolerant of low-oxygen conditions. The deep sea is also very little known by humans. It’s possible, even if it’s unlikely, that deep-sea trilobites survived the Great Dying and that their descendants are still around, unknown to science.

One interesting note, and an ongoing mystery about trilobites, is that while we know they were arthropods, we don’t actually know which branch of the phylum Arthropoda they’re most related to. That’s because there are no ancestral versions of the trilobite that have ever been found. When they appear in the fossil record, they’re already recognizably trilobites. It’s possible that the ancestral forms didn’t have exoskeletons that were likely to fossilize, or that we just haven’t found the right fossil bed yet. Until we learn more, it’ll remain a mystery.

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!

Episode 431: The New Dire Wolf

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Thanks to Jayson for suggesting this week’s topic, the new “dire wolf”! Also, possibly the same but maybe a different Jayson is the youngest member of the Cedar Springs Homeschool Science Olympiad Team, who are on their way to the Science Olympiad Nationals! They’re almost to their funding goal if you can help out.

Further reading:

Dire wolves and woolly mammoths: Why scientists are worried about de-extinction

The story of dire wolves goes beyond de-extinction

These fluffy white wolves explain everything wrong with bringing back extinct animals

Dire Wolves Split from Living Canids 5.7 Million Years Ago: Study

This prehistoric monster is the largest dog that ever lived and was able to crush bone with its deadly teeth – but was wiped out by cats

“Dire wolf” puppies:

An artist’s interpretation of the dire wolf (red coats) and grey wolves (grey coats) [taken from fourth link above]:

The “mammoth fur” mice:

Show transcript:

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

This week we have a suggestion from Jayson, who wants to learn about the so-called “new” dire wolf.

Before we get started, a big shout-out to another Jayson, or maybe the same one I’m honestly not sure, who is the youngest member of the Cedar Springs Homeschool Science Olympiad Team. They’ve advanced to the nationals! There’s a link in the show notes if you want to donate a little to help them with their travel expenses. This is a local team to me so I’m especially proud of them, and not to brag, but I’ve actually met Jayson and his sister and they’re both smart, awesome kids.

Now, let’s find out about this new dire wolf that was announced last month. In early April 2025, a biotech company called Colossal Biosciences made the extraordinary claim that they had produced three dire wolf puppies. Since dire wolves went extinct around 13,000 years ago, this is a really big deal.

Before we get into the details of Colossal’s claim, let’s refresh our memory about the dire wolf. We talked about it in episode 207, so I’ve taken a lot of my information from that episode.

According to a 2021 study published in Nature, 5.7 million years ago, the shared ancestor of dire wolves and many other canids lived in Eurasia. Sea levels were low enough that the Bering land bridge, also called Beringia, connected the very eastern part of Asia to the very western part of North America. One population of this canid migrated into North America while the rest of the population stayed in Asia. The two populations evolved separately until the North American population developed into what we now call dire wolves. Meanwhile, the Eurasian population developed into many of the modern species we know today, and some of those eventually migrated into North America too.

By the time the gray wolf and coyote populated North America, a little over one million years ago, the dire wolf was so distantly related to it that even when their territories overlapped, the species avoided each other and didn’t interbreed. We’ve talked about canids in many previous episodes, including how readily they interbreed with each other, so for the dire wolf to remain genetically isolated, it was obviously not closely related at all to other canids at that point.

The dire wolf looked a lot like a grey wolf, but researchers now think that was due more to convergent evolution than to its relationship with wolves. Both lived in the same habitats: plains, grasslands, and forests. The dire wolf was slightly taller on average than the modern grey wolf, which can grow a little over three feet tall at the shoulder, or 97 cm, but it was much heavier and more solidly built. It wouldn’t have been able to run nearly as fast, but it could attack and kill larger animals.

The dire wolf went extinct around 13,000 years ago, but Colossal now claims that they’re no longer extinct. There are now exactly three dire wolves in the world, two males and a female, born to two different dogs who acted as surrogate mothers. But are these really dire wolves, or are they something else?

Colossal’s scientists claim that the 2021 Nature study that determined gray wolves and dire wolves weren’t closely related and couldn’t interbreed was based on poor-quality DNA studies. They redid the genetic scans and determined that dire wolves were more wolf-like than the 2021 study thought. But the 2021 study was published in the foremost peer-reviewed journal in the scientific world. Colossal’s study hasn’t been published at all.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. In other words, until a study is published in a respected peer-reviewed journal that contradicts the 2021 Nature study, all the genetic evidence we have now points to dire wolves and gray wolves being extremely genetically different.

Colossal’s scientists made 20 edits to 14 gray wolf genes to make the puppies more similar to dire wolves in size, with white coats even though there’s no evidence that real dire wolves were white. Colossal claims that the genomes of grey wolves and dire wolves are 99.5% identical, but those 20 changes are out of 12,235,000 genetic differences. Genetically these puppies are just modern grey wolves.

The biggest problem with the claim that the puppies are actually dire wolves is that it implies that bringing back an extinct species is really easy. Not only can this make people think that extinction isn’t a big deal after all, it also ignores the issues that make animals go extinct in the first place, especially recently, like pollution, habitat loss, climate change, invasive species, and over-hunting or capture of wild animals to sell as exotic pets.

In the very first, very terrible Strange Animals Podcast episode, I talked about the quagga, a species of zebra from South Africa that went extinct very recently due to human causes. I was excited about the de-extinction attempts for that species, which mostly involved breeding zebras with the most quagga genetic material to select for quagga-like traits. I still think this is a good project, since the quagga’s ecosystem is still in place and still has a quagga-shaped hole in it. Colossal has also done good work with red wolves in North America, helping to keep that critically endangered species genetically healthy.

Also in an early episode, I talked about Colossal’s de-extinction plans for the mammoth. I was all for that too, tongue-in-cheek, because I said I wanted a pet mammoth. Now I’ve changed my mind. Awesome as it would be to see real live mammoths, there’s not any real habitat left for them. Between climate change, habitat loss due to human activity, and more than ten thousand years of evolution of other animals to move into the mammoth’s empty ecological niche, where does Colossal plan to put its mammoths? We don’t even have safe habitats for elephants anymore, which are still around.

Earlier this year, Colossal announced another genetically modified animal, mice with long golden-brown fur inspired by woolly mammoth fur. Mammoths were highly adapted for cold far beyond long fur, while modern elephants are highly adapted for hot climates. If Colossal’s mammoths are anything like its so-called dire wolves, they’ll be editing genes to change appearance, not anything else. That’s unethical, basically taking an endangered heat-adapted animal, giving it a heavy coat, and sticking it into a cold climate. It will have no herd mates and no knowledge of how to survive in the wild in a climate it was never intended to live in, meaning it will be dependent on human help. Once the novelty of “oh look, a furry elephant” wears off, and Colossal either goes out of business or moves on to the next big thing, what will happen to the mammoth?

That’s one of the concerns about the new dire wolves. They don’t have a wolf family. They’re completely dependent on humans and will never be able to survive in the wild, even if they were allowed to try.

Let’s return to extinct canids to finish on a brighter note, something that Richard from NC brought to my attention recently. It’s an animal called epicyon, a canid that may have lived as recently as 5 million years ago in North America. It’s the largest canid ever discovered, around 3 feet tall, or 90 cm, at the shoulder and as much as 8 feet long, or 2.5 meters. It probably weighed as much as a small bear, and it was strong and powerful so that it was probably more bear-like or lion-like in body shape than wolf-like.

It had a short, powerful muzzle and strong jaws with huge teeth meant for crushing bone, similar to modern hyenas. It wasn’t anywhere near as fast a runner as modern wolves, but it could probably move pretty fast when it needed to. Some scientists think it was a pack animal, but it may have been an ambush predator instead of hunting in packs like wolves and other modern canids do.

Epicyon probably preyed on megaherbivores like camels, horses, pronghorn, rhinoceroses, and peccaries, all of which were common in North America several million years ago. It probably also scavenged a lot of its food, since it could break bones other animals couldn’t. We’re not sure why epicyon went extinct, but some scientists suggest it was out-competed by saber-tooth cats and more modern canids–including the dire wolf.

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 430: The Fake and the Real Coelacanth

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This week we examine two recent articles about coelacanth discoveries. Which one is real and which one is fake?!

Further reading:

Fake California Coelacanth

First record of a living coelacanth from North Maluku, Indonesia

A real coelacanth photo:

A fake coelacanth photo (or at least the article is a fake) [photo taken from the first article linked above]:

A real coelacanth photo [photo from the second article linked above]:

Show transcript:

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

I had another episode planned for this week, but then I read an article by geologist Sharon Hill and decided the topic she researched was so important we need to cover it here. No, it’s not the dire wolf—that’s next week. It’s the coelacanth.

We talked about the coelocanth way back in episode two, with updates in a few later episodes. Because episode two is so old that it’s dropped off the podcast feed, and to listen to it you have to actually go to the podcast’s website, I’m going to quote from it extensively here.

In December of 1938, a museum curator in South Africa named Marjorie Courtenay Lattimer got a message from a friend of hers, a fisherman named Hendrick Goosen, who had just arrived with a new catch. Lattimer was on the lookout for specimens for her tiny museum, and Goosen was happy to let her have anything interesting. Lattimer went down to the dock. Then she noticed THE FISH.

It was five feet long, or 1.5 meters, blueish with shimmery silvery markings, with strange lobed fins and scales like armored plates. She described it as the most beautiful fish she had ever seen. She didn’t know what it was, but she wanted it. She took the fish back to the museum in a taxi and went through her reference books to identify it.

Imagine it. She’s flipped through a couple of books but nothing looks even remotely like her fish. Then she turns a page and there’s a picture of the fish–but it’s extinct. It’s been extinct for some 66 million years. But it’s also a very recently alive fish resting on ice in the back of her museum.

Lattimer sketched the fish and sent the drawing and a description to a professor at Rhodes University, J.L.B. Smith. But Smith was on Christmas break and didn’t get her message until January 3rd. In the meantime, Lattimer’s museum director told her the fish was a grouper and not worth the ice it was lying on.

December is the middle of summer in South Africa, so to keep the fish from rotting away, she had it mounted. Then Smith sent her a near-hysterical cable that read, “MOST IMPORTANT PRESERVE SKELETON AND GILLS.” Oops.

Smith got a little obsessed about finding another coelacanth. He offered huge rewards for a specimen. But it wasn’t until December of 1952 that a pair of local fishermen on the island of Anjuan, about halfway between Tanzania and Madagascar, turned up with a fish they called the gombessa. It was a second coelacanth.

Everyone was happy. The fishermen got a huge reward—a hundred British pounds—and Smith had an intact coelacanth. He actually cried when he saw it.

Most people have heard of the coelacanth because its discovery is such a great story. But why is the fish such a big deal?

The coelacanth isn’t just a fish that was supposed to be extinct and was discovered alive and well, although that’s pretty awesome. It’s a strange fish, more closely related to mammals and reptiles than it is to ordinary ray-finned fish. The only living fish even slightly like it is the lungfish, which we talked about in episode 55.

While the coelacanth is unique in a lot of ways, it’s those lobed fins that are really exciting. It’s not a stretch to say its paired fins look like nubby legs with frills instead of digits. Until DNA sequencing in 2013, many researchers thought the coelacanth was a sort of missing link between water-dwelling animals and those that first developed the ability to walk on land. As it happens, the lungfish turns out to be closer to that stage than the coelacanth, and both the lungfish and the coelacanth had already split off from the shared ancestor of marine and terrestrial organisms when they evolved around 400 million years ago. But for scientists in the mid-20th century, studying a fish that looked like it had little legs must have been electrifying.

But this fish story isn’t over yet. In 1997, a marine biologist on honeymoon in Indonesia found a coelacanth in a local market. And it was a different species of coelacanth. Can you imagine a better wedding gift?

Coelacanths are placid fish who do a lot of drifting, although their eight marvelous fins make them very maneuverable. They stay close to the coast and prefer rocky areas. They especially love underwater caves. They hunt for smaller fish and cephalopods like squid at night and rest in caves or hidden among rocks during the day. Sometimes sharks eat them, but for the most part coelacanths lead comfortable lives, floating around eating stuff. Sometimes they float around tail up or even upside down because they just don’t care.

Coelacanths have since been discovered in the western Indian Ocean, off the coast of Madagascar, and a few other places. I finished episode two by saying, “So far, living coelacanths have mostly been found off the coast of Africa, but they’re much more widely spread in the fossil record. Rumors of coelacanths in other places, like the Gulf of Mexico or around Easter Island, keep popping up. Maybe one day another population of these awesome fish will be discovered.”

And in late April 2025, it seemed that my hope had come true. An article was released by a website called Animals Around the Globe, detailing a new discovery of a coelacanth off the coast of San Diego, California!

Now, I missed that article but Sharon Hill didn’t. She’s a geologist whose work I follow and mention here occasionally. She likes to post about cryptids and other mysteries and dig into the real science behind reports, and she suspected right away that there was something fake about the San Diego coelacanth. There’s a link in the show notes to her article, which is worth reading. For one thing, she explains how she did the research to determine whether the article was real.

Her first step was to look for other articles about the finding. Animals Around the Globe isn’t a scientific site, just a blog that posts about animals. A new species of coelacanth, especially one found in North America, would be a HUGE big deal in the scientific community, so there should be lots of articles about it. But Sharon didn’t find anything.

Her next step was to contact the two institutions referenced in the article, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. Scripps wrote back first and said the article was a fake. Sharon suspects the article was AI generated. The blog that posted it gets money from advertising, and the more people click through to read the article, the more money they make. That’s why I’m not linking to that article from the show notes.

As it happens, on the same day that that article was published, another article about the coelacanth was published, this one in Nature Scientific Reports. It’s titled “First record of a living coelacanth from North Maluku, Indonesia,” and I do link to it in the show notes because it’s a real sighting and an article written by real scientists, not AI.

In October 2024 a team of scientists were doing deep diving off the coast of North Maluku, Indonesia, on a submerged volcanic slope where they suspected coelacanths were living. It was a dangerous dive because they had to descend so deep, so it required them to use a decompression stage on the way back to the surface. A pair of divers were on their way to the decompression site when they saw a big fish hovering over a boulder. It was a coelacanth that they estimated as being about 5 feet long, or 1.5 meters!

It swam away slowly, but the next morning the divers returned and saw it again. Because coelacanths are gray with a pattern of white dots, and each dot pattern is unique, they knew it was the same fish. They were able to get more photos and video. The most important thing, though, is that while coelacanths have been found in other parts of Indonesia, they hadn’t been found in this particular area. Live individuals also hadn’t ever been seen by actual divers, just ROVs.

The more we know about these amazing fish, the better they can be protected. Fake articles only bring confusion and doubt.

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 429: Foxes!

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Thanks to Katie, Torin, and Eilee for suggesting this week’s topic, foxes!

Further reading:

Meet the Endangered Sierra Nevada Red Fox

Long snouts protect foxes when diving headfirst in snow

Black bears may play important role in protecting gray fox

The red fox:

A black and gold Sierra Nevada red fox [photo taken from the first link above]:

The extremely fluffy Arctic fox:

The gray fox [photo by VJAnderson – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=115382784]:

Show transcript:

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

This week we have an episode about foxes, a suggestion by Katie, and we’ll talk about fox species suggested by Torin and Eilee.

Foxes are omnivorous canids related to dogs and wolves, and just to be confusing, male foxes are sometimes called dogs. Female foxes are vixens and baby foxes are cubs or kits. But even though foxes are related to dogs and wolves, they’re not so closely related that they can interbreed with those other canids. Plus, of course, not every animal that’s called a fox is actually considered a fox scientifically.

The largest species of fox is the red fox, which also happens to be the one most people are familiar with. It’s common throughout much of North America, Eurasia, and the Middle East, and even parts of northern Africa. It’s also been introduced in Australia, where it’s an invasive species. It’s a rusty-red in color with black legs and white markings, including a white tip to the tail. It has large pointed ears and a long narrow muzzle.

There are lots of subspecies of red fox throughout its natural range, including one suggested by Eilee, the Sierra Nevada red fox. It lives in the Sierra Nevada and Oregon Cascades mountain ranges in the western United States, in parts of California, Nevada, and Oregon. It’s smaller than the red fox and some individuals are red, some are black and gold, and some are a mix of red and gray-brown. Its paws are covered with long hair that protects the paw pads from snow, and its coat is thick.

The Sierra Nevada red fox was first identified as a subspecies in 1937, but it took more than half a century until any scientists started studying it. It used to be common throughout the mountain ranges where it lives, but after more than a century of trapping for fur and shooting it for bounty, it’s one of the rarest foxes in the world. Fewer than 100 adults are known to survive in the wild, maybe even fewer than 50.

For a long time, scientists thought the Sierra Nevada red fox had been extirpated from California, and that it might even be completely extinct. Then a camera trap got pictures of one in 2010. It’s fully protected now, so hopefully its numbers will grow.

Torin suggested we learn about the Arctic fox, which lives in far northern areas like Greenland, Siberia, Alaska, and parts of northern Canada. The Arctic fox’s muzzle is relatively short and its ears are rounded, and it also has a rounder body and shorter legs than other foxes. This helps keep it warm, since it has less surface area to lose body heat.

During the summer, the Arctic fox is brown and gray, while in winter it’s white to blend in with the snowy background. There are some individuals who are gray or brown-gray year-round, although it’s rare. The Arctic fox’s fur is thick and layered to keep it warm even in bitterly cold weather, and like the Sierra Nevada red fox, it has a lot of fur on its feet.

The Arctic fox is omnivorous like other foxes, although in the winter it mostly eats meat. In summer it eats bird eggs, berries, and even seaweed along with fish and small animals like lemmings and mice. It also eats carrion from dead animals and what’s left from a polar bear’s meal. It has such a good sense of smell that it can smell a carcass from 25 miles away, or 40 km. Its hearing is good too, which allows it to find mice and other animals that are traveling under the snow. Like other foxes, it will poke its nose into the snow quickly to grab the little animal, an activity called mousing. A study from 2024 revealed that the fox’s snout shape helps keep it from getting injured in deep and compacted snow.

The grey fox lives throughout North and Central America, although it’s less common than it used to be due to habitat loss and hunting by humans. It’s a grizzled gray in color with reddish or tan legs, and a black stripe down its tail ending in a black tail tip.

It’s actually not that closely related to what are called true foxes. Its pupils are rounded like a dog’s instead of slit like other foxes, which have eyes that resemble cats’ eyes. The grey fox also has hooked claws that allow it to climb trees like a cat, and when it’s in a tree it can climb around in it just fine. A vixen may make her den in the hollow part of a tree to have her babies, sometimes as much as 30 feet, or 9 meters, above the ground, although most of the time gray foxes den on the ground, in a burrow, hollow log, or even in an abandoned human building.

The gray fox is small, not much bigger than a domestic cat, and it eats a lot of the same things that coyotes eat. If a coyote feels like a grey fox is encroaching on its territory, the coyote will kill the fox. Naturally, foxes are cautious around coyotes as a result. A study published in 2021 discovered that in areas where black bears live alongside coyotes and gray foxes, the foxes spend a lot of time hanging out near bears. In winter when the bears are hibernating, the foxes leave because coyotes will move into the area until the bears re-emerge in spring. Coyotes are afraid of bears, so the presence of bears protects the foxes as long as the fox doesn’t annoy the bear. I feel like this would make a great basis for a cartoon.

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 426 Lots of Little Birds

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Thanks to Murilo, Alexandra, and Joel for their suggestions this week!

The bird sounds in this episode come from xeno-canto, a great resource for lots of animal sounds!

A cactus wren [picture by Mike & Chris – Cactus WrenUploaded by snowmanradio, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15876953]:

The sultan tit [photo by By Dibyendu Ash – CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=72070998]:

A female scarlet tanager [photo by Félix Uribe, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=81340425]. The male is red with black wings:

The Northern cardinal:

The yellow grosbeak [photo by Arjan Haverkamp – originally posted to Flickr as 2008-08-23-15h00m37.IMG_4747l, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9596644]:

The purple martin isn’t actually purple [photo by JJ Cadiz, Cajay – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4255626]:

The dusky thrush [photo by Jerry Gunner from Lincoln, UK Uploaded by snowmanradio, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20762838]:

The European rose chafer, not a bird [photo by I, Chrumps, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2521547]:

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to learn about a lot of little birds that deserve more attention, because they’re cute and interesting. Thanks to Murilo, Alexandra, and Joel for their little bird suggestions!

All the birds we’ll talk about today are called passerines, because they belong to the order Passeriformes. They’re also sometimes referred to as perching birds or songbirds, even though not all passerines sing. Passerines are common throughout the world, with more than 6,500 species identified. I’ve seen about 150 of those species, so clearly I need to work harder as a birdwatcher.

Passerines are referred to as perching birds because of their feet. A passerine bird has three toes that point forward and another toe pointing backwards, which allows it to wrap its toes securely around a twig or branch to sit. Its legs are also adapted so that the toes automatically curl up tight when the leg is bent. That’s why a sleeping bird doesn’t fall off its branch.

Let’s start with one of Murilo’s suggestions, the wren. Wrens are birds in the family Troglodytidae, and are usually very small with a short tail, a pointy bill that turns slightly downward at the tip, and brown plumage. It mainly eats insects and larvae that it finds in nooks and crannies of trees, and many species will investigate dark places like hollow logs, the openings to caves, or your apartment if you leave the back door open on a warm day. Many sing beautiful songs and have very loud voices for such little bitty birds.

Most wrens are native to the Americas, including the canyon wren that’s native to western North America in desert areas. It’s cinnamon-brown with a white throat and an especially long bill, which it uses to find insects in rock crevices. It lives in canyons and has a more flattened skull than other wrens, which means it can get its head into crevices without hurting itself. No one has ever seen a canyon wren drink water, and scientists think it probably gets all the water it needs from the insects it eats. Where do the insects get the water they need? That’s an episode for another day.

This is what a canyon wren sounds like:

[bird sound]

Not every bird that’s called a wren is actually in the family Troglodytidae. Some just resemble wrens, like an unusual bird that Murilo brought to my attention. It’s called Lyall’s wren but it’s actually in the family Acanthisittidae, and it was once widespread throughout New Zealand. By the time it was scientifically identified and described in 1894, it was restricted to a single island in Cook Strait.

Lyall’s wren was flightless, and only five passerines are flightless as far as we know. All five were island birds who have since gone extinct, which is unfortunately the case with Lyall’s wren too. It was greenish-brown with a yellow eye stripe and its tail was just a little short nub. We don’t know much about it because between 1894 when a lighthouse was built and some families moved to the island to work at the lighthouse, bringing their housecats, and 1925 when the feral cat colony on the island was finally killed off, all the remaining Lyall’s wrens were eaten by cats or killed by people to sell as museum specimens. To be clear, it’s entirely the fault of people that the bird went extinct, because they brought the cats to the island and let them run loose. The bird probably actually went extinct in 1895, just one year after cats were introduced to the island.

Murilo also suggested some little birds called chickadees and tits, which belong to the family Paridae. They’re very small, often brightly colored or with bright white markings, with short bills that help them crack seeds open. They also eat insects. They’re not found in South America or Australia, but they’re very common in North America, Eurasia, and most of sub-Saharan Africa. Many species love to visit bird feeders, and since they’re cute and active little birds, people are happy to have them around.

Some species in this family have crests, which makes them even cuter. The tufted titmouse, which is found in eastern North America, has a little tufted crest on its head, for instance. It’s a soft gray-blue in color with patches of rusty-red under its wings, and white underneath. The gray crested tit lives in western Europe and also has a fluffy crest on its head. It’s gray-brown with a thin black and white ring around its neck and a buff-colored underside. The yellow tit lives only in forests in central Taiwan and is a gorgeous dark blue with bright yellow underneath and on its face, with a darker crest. It’s so beautiful that it’s becoming rare, since people trap the birds to sell to disreputable collectors. The sultan tit is even more spectacular, if that’s possible, since the male is black with bright yellow underparts and a bright yellow crest. It lives in parts of south Asia and some subspecies have a black crest instead.

This is what a sultan tit sounds like:

[bird sound]

Another spectacular bird is one Alexandra suggested, the summer tanager. It’s a common summer visitor in the eastern and southwestern United States that winters in Central and northern South America. The male is a bright, cheerful red all over while the female is yellow. The western tanager is a close relation that lives in western North America, wintering in Mexico. The male has a mostly black back with a yellow rump and yellow underneath, with red and orange on his face. Females are yellowy-green and gray. The scarlet tanager is also similar, although the male is red with black wings and the female is yellowy-green and gray. They eat insects and fruit, and spend a lot of time in the very tops of trees.

This is what a scarlet tanager sounds like:

[bird sound]

Despite their names, all three of these tanagers aren’t actually tanagers. Tanagers are members of the family Thraupidae and are native to central and South America. Many of them are brightly colored and absolutely gorgeous, like the red-legged honeycreeper that’s common in Central and parts of South America. The male has a black back and tail and is bright blue on the rest of his body, except for a black mask over his eyes. His long curved bill is also black, but his legs are bright red. The female has red legs but she’s mostly greeny-yellow.

The North American tanagers are actually more closely related to the cardinal than to other tanagers, and are placed in the family Cardinalidae. The family is named after the northern cardinal, which is common throughout most of the United States and parts of Mexico. The male is bright red with black around his bill, while the female is more of a rosy brown color. Both have red bills and tufted crests. In North America, the cardinal appears on a lot of Christmas cards because its bright red plumage against a snowy background is so cheerful in winter.

This is what a northern cardinal sounds like:

[bird sound]

Alexandra also suggested the blue grosbeak, while Joel suggested the yellow grosbeak. Both are also members of the family Cardinalidae. The blue grosbeak lives in much of the United States in summer and spends the winter in Mexico and Central America. The male is blue with black and rufous markings and a silvery-gray beak, while the female is rufous-brown and gray. The yellow grosbeak lives along the Pacific slope of Mexico and may be the same as the golden grosbeak that lives in western South America, or a very close relation. Scientists aren’t sure yet. The male is a bright golden yellow with black and white wings and a black bill, while females are a less conspicuous green-yellow. The yellow grosbeak is larger than the blue but they’re both pretty big and robust. They eat insects and lots of other small animals like snails and spiders, along with fruit and seeds. Sometimes a yellow grosbeak will show up farther north, in the United States, and birdwatchers lose their minds with excitement.

This is what a yellow grosbeak sounds like:

[bird sound]

Joel also suggested the purple martin, a type of swallow that’s common throughout the Americas. It’s not purple but it is a dark blue-black color with iridescence that reflects light. This makes the bird look anywhere from dark purple to blue depending on the angle of the light. The male is much darker than the female, who is more gray-blue in color. It spends the summer in North America, raising babies and eating lots of insects, then migrates to South America to spend the winter.

This is what a purple martin sounds like:

[bird sound]

Another Joel suggestion is the dusky thrush, which is another passerine that migrates a long distance. It spends the summer in Siberia and nearby areas to nest, then flies south to spend the winter in southern China, Japan, India, Vietnam, Korea, and other nearby areas. It’s mostly brown on its back and white underneath with lots of speckles, and a light stripe over its eye. Males and females look very similar. It eats insects, spiders, worms, seeds, and berries and spends a lot of its time on the ground. Every so often a dusky thrush will get lost during migration and end up in western Europe or Alaska, and again, birdwatchers in those areas go nuts trying to catch a glimpse of it.

This is what a dusky thrush sounds like:

[bird sound]

Let’s finish this episode with another of Joel’s suggestions, the European rose chafer. You may be wondering what kind of bird this is, and that is exactly what I was wondering. It sounds very pretty! Then I looked it up, and it’s not a bird at all, it’s a type of beetle!

The rose chafer is a big metallic-green beetle related to scarabs that grows up to 20 mm long. It’s common in Europe and some parts of southeast Asia, and is often found on rose bushes in summer. It eats flowers, including the petals, nectar, and pollen, and really likes roses.

The female rose chafer lays her eggs in the ground and the larvae eat decaying vegetation. There’s also a related beetle called the rose chafer that lives in parts of North America, but it’s sort of a muddy tan color, and while it likes to eat roses and other flowers, it also likes to eat fruit like peaches and grapes. Its larvae eat roots and can damage plants.

Since the European rose chafer is such attractive beetle, with an iridescent bronze shimmer to its emerald-green carapace, you’d think people who grow roses would like to have them on their rose bushes, but this isn’t actually the case. I guess people who grow roses want to see the roses without them being all chewed up by beetles. To bring it back to birds, birds don’t eat the rose chafer because the beetle contains toxins that make it taste awful. But they’re still really pretty.

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Thanks for listening!