Category Archives: North America

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.

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 425 Rabbits!

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Thanks to Alyx and Richard from NC for their suggestions this week! Let’s learn about rabbits!

Further reading:

Why your pet rabbit is more docile than its wild relative

FOUND: Small enigmatic rabbit with black tail lost to science for more than 120 years rediscovered hopping around mountain range in Mexico

The Omiltemi cottontail rabbit, as caught on a camera trap [photo taken from second article linked above]:

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to talk about bunnies, and also learn about how a wild animal differs from its domesticated counterpart. Thanks to Alyx for suggesting this excellent topic. Thanks also to Richard from NC who alerted me to a rediscovered rabbit we’ll discuss too.

Thanks for all the well wishes in the last few weeks about my surgery. It went just fine and all I have now is a cool-looking new scar, although I was seriously hoarse for about a week. It’s pretty weather here in East Tennessee and officially it’s spring in the northern hemisphere, so let’s talk about some springtime bunnies!

Collectively rabbits and hares are called leporids after their family, Leporidae. Leporids are famous for hopping instead of walking, and they’re able to do so because their hind legs are longer than their front legs and have specialized ankle joints. Ancestors of leporids developed this ankle as much as 53 million years ago, but their legs were much shorter so they probably ran instead of hopped. Hares have longer legs than rabbits and can run faster as a result, but both rabbits and hares are known for their ability to bound at high speeds. When a rabbit or hare runs, it pushes off from the ground with the tips of its long hind toes, and its toes are connected with webbed skin so they can’t spread apart. If the toes did spread apart, they would be more likely to get injured. Rabbits and hares also don’t have paw pads like dogs and cats do. The bottom of its foot is covered with dense, coarse fur that protects the toes from injury. Its long claws help it get a good purchase on the ground so its feet won’t slip.

Leporids eat plants, including grass, weeds, twigs, and bark. Animals that eat grass and other tough plants have specialized digestive systems so they can extract as many nutrients from the plants as possible. Many animals swallow the plants, digest them for a while, then bring up cuds of plants and water to chew more thoroughly. Rabbits and hares don’t chew their cud in that way, but they do have a system that allows them to twice-digest the plants they eat.

After a leporid eats some plants, the plant pieces go into the stomach, naturally, and then travel into the first part of the large intestine, called the cecum. The cecum separates the softer parts of the plants from the harder, less digestible parts. The hard parts are compressed into hard pellets that the rabbit poops out. But the soft parts of the plants, which are most nutritious, develop into softer pellets. These are called cecotropes, and as soon as the rabbit poops out the cecotropes, it immediately eats them again. This allows the digestive system to get a second round to extract more nutrients from the plants.

Hares aren’t domesticated, but rabbits have probably been domesticated many times in different places over the last several thousand years, first for food and fur, and then as pets. The domesticated rabbit we have today is descended from the European rabbit, also called the cony. If other species of rabbit were ever domesticated, we don’t have record of it. The rabbit has also been introduced into the wild in places it has no business to be, like Australia, where it’s an invasive species. You know where else the European rabbit has been introduced? The British Isles. It’s native to mainland Europe, not England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and smaller islands nearby. Historians think the rabbit was introduced to England soon after the year 1066, but it got really common a few hundred years later.

We discussed domestication way back in episode 106, mostly in relation to dogs. An interesting thing happens with domestication. Certain physical traits come along with the behavioral traits of reduced aggression and willingness to treat humans as surrogate parents. In the case of dogs, these often include a puppy-like appearance, including floppy ears, curled tail, smaller adult size, and a rounder head with smaller jaws. White patches of fur start to show up too.

This is true in rabbits as well as dogs. Because humans wanted to breed rabbits that weren’t scared of people, domesticated rabbits are less anxious and aggressive in general than their wild counterparts. When traits like white patches, lop ears, and a more rounded face appeared in the domesticated population, people would keep those rabbits to breed because they’re extra cute, which has led to over three hundred different breeds recognized today by rabbit enthusiasts.

Because domesticated rabbits are calmer and more trusting than wild rabbits, they can’t survive long in the wild. A domesticated rabbit doesn’t know how to escape from predators or avoid cars, and it’s not used to cold weather. If you decide to adopt a bunny, make sure you do research ahead of time to know what to expect, and as with most animals it’s best to adopt two so they won’t be lonely. Rabbits are social animals and need a rabbit friend. There are even pet rescues that specialize in rabbits who need homes.

We talked about giant rabbits in episode 115, and the tiny volcano rabbit in episode 356, so let’s finish this episode with a medium-sized rabbit called the Omiltemi cottontail. Cottontail rabbits are native to the Americas and most have fluffy white fur on the underside of their tails. The Omiltemi cottontail doesn’t have any white fur at all, and is reddish-brown and black in color with some lighter gray on its face. It’s large for a wild rabbit, about 18 inches long, or 45 cm, although it’s actually smaller than other rabbits that live in the area. It lives only in Mexico, specifically in a single part of the Sierra Madre del Sur mountain range, in what is now the Omiltemi Ecological State Park.

It was first described in 1904 and then reportedly wasn’t seen again, although the local people knew all about it. Even though it lives in a protected area, poaching is still a big problem. When an expedition to find the rabbit got underway in 2019, local hunters provided pelts to the scientists when they asked about the rabbit, since they didn’t know they weren’t supposed to kill the local rabbits. They certainly didn’t know they had an incredibly rare species of rabbit living in their back yards.

The team used camera traps, drone surveys, and the knowledge of local people to find and identify the Omiltemi cottontail. It turns out that the rabbit is mostly nocturnal and prefers higher elevations, which made it harder to find. We still don’t know how many there are left, but now that scientists are certain that it’s not extinct, it can be better protected.

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 424 Old-Timey Giant Snakes

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Show transcript:

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

Recently I read about a giant snake supposedly seen in Tennessee in 1908. The story seemed a little suspicious so I dug into it, and it got a lot more complicated than I expected.

On July 25, 1908, the St. Louis (Missouri) Globe-Democrat ran an article about a giant snake in Loudon, Tennessee. Loudon is a town half an hour’s drive away from Knoxville in East Tennessee, although it took longer to get there from Knoxville in 1908. According to the article, the snake was “at least twenty-five feet in length, eight inches in diameter and twenty-four inches in circumference.”

The longest snake ever reliably measured is a reticulated python named Medusa, who was measured as 25 feet 2 inches long in 2011, or 7.67 meters. Medusa holds the world record for the longest snake in captivity. Reticulated pythons are constrictors, which are non-venomous snakes who kill their prey by squeezing them until blood flow is shut off to the organs, causing cardiac arrest and death. As a result, they’re incredibly strong snakes. The reticulated python is native to southern Asia and not likely to be found running loose in East Tennessee even today, and certainly not in 1908.

The famous Boa constrictor and other snakes in the genus Boa are all native to Central and South America, while the closely related anaconda is from tropical South America. These snakes are also constrictors.

The anaconda is rumored to grow over 30 feet long, or 9 meters, although the longest specimen ever reliably measured was 17 feet long, or 5.2 meters. Since snake skin is stretchy, though, preserved skins of huge size are often provided as proof of snakes much longer than the known maximum. While the anaconda isn’t as long as the reticulated python, it’s much bulkier, so a 25-foot anaconda would be much heavier and larger around than a 25-foot reticulated python.

The 1908 article claims that the snake “has been seen off and on for the last twenty-eight years, but not until this summer has it caused any serious alarm.” I don’t know about you, but even as someone who likes animals and thinks snakes are neat, if I saw a 25-foot snake I would be a little bit alarmed even if it wasn’t doing anything. The article then describes how the snake had knocked down a fence while climbing over it and that it had taken a lamb. One man even managed to shoot the snake, although only with “small shot,” and the article claims that the snake, “in a frenzy from the pain, tore up saplings in getting away.”

The article finishes by reporting that women and children were barricaded in their homes while men organized a posse to hunt down the giant snake, which was rumored to live in a cave overlooking the river.

The same article ran in various newspapers around the country for months, but there was no follow-up to let readers know if the snake had been found. But the story didn’t appear in any Tennessee newspapers.

The only 1908 article about a giant snake in Tennessee that appears in a Tennessee newspaper is from August 21. The Chattanooga, Tennessee Daily Times reported that a blacksnake “fully six feet long and two inches in diameter” had been spotted eating young pigeons above the Birmingham railway station. A police officer shot and killed it, but its body couldn’t be recovered from the steep hillside above the tunnel.

“Blacksnake” is a term used for two snakes that are common throughout the southern United States: the eastern black kingsnake and the North American racer. Both are black in color and can grow more than 6 feet long, or 1.8 meters. Both are non-venomous and eat small animals like mice, frogs, and lizards, while the kingsnake also sometimes eats other snakes.

The longest snake found in Tennessee, which also lives throughout much of eastern North America, is the gray ratsnake, which is frequently 6 feet long and sometimes longer. One unverified report of a captive snake 8 feet 10 inches long, or almost 2.5 meters, comes from Tennessee. It’s a mixture of dark and light gray with a lighter belly. It’s non-venomous and is actually a constrictor, although it’s not dangerous to humans. If it feels threatened, it will sometimes pretend to strike and rattle the tip of its tail against dead leaves or whatever else might be underneath it, which produces a buzzing sound that mimics a rattlesnake’s rattle. You’re not fooling anyone, gray ratsnake.

The eastern racer will also vibrate its tail against leaves to imitate a rattlesnake’s rattle, but the eastern racer is such a fast-moving snake that it doesn’t usually need to convince potential predators it’s dangerous. It just runs away. Despite its name of Coluber constrictor, it’s not actually a constrictor, although it will pin an animal to the ground with its body until it can swallow it whole. It and the gray ratsnake can both climb trees and will eat bird eggs and young birds when they find them.

There is another article about a giant snake in a Tennessee newspaper from 1908. The Chattanooga Star reported on August 20 that a 12-foot, or 3.6 meter, rattlesnake was attacked by a boar when it tried to enter a hog pen. The farmer managed to shoot the snake, which had 29 rattles. The snake was referred to as “Big Jim” in the area. But that story was supposed to have happened in Sullivan, Indiana, not in Tennessee.

But Indiana newspapers don’t run this account. A July 22, 1908 article in the Indianapolis News reports that a rattlesnake with 26 rattles was killed in Nashville, Indiana, but that snake was not quite six feet long, or 1.8 meters.

The “Big Jim” account does appear in one Indiana newspaper, the Hamilton County Times from August 21, 1908. But that article is headlined “Some Hoosier ‘Nature Fakes’” and says Big Jim was first spotted in the neighboring state of Illinois but had been discovered attacking a farmer’s chickens in Sullivan County, Indiana. This must be the same as Sullivan, Indiana reported in the Tennessee paper. But Big Jim was only ten feet long in the Indiana story, or 3 meters, and wasn’t killed. The article says the local farmers were organizing to hunt it down, but then goes on to talk about some other stories of huge snakes and a giant fish. It seems clear that the Indiana article is meant to be amusing, not factual.

The largest rattlesnake species is the eastern diamondback rattler, and the largest one ever reliably measured was 7.8 feet long, or 2.4 meters. That’s big, but it’s not Big Jim big. The eastern diamondback also doesn’t live anywhere near Indiana or Illinois. It’s native to the southeastern United States, especially along the coast.

Newspaper reporters weren’t always scrupulous in the olden days, sometimes making up stories to fill space and entertain the reader. Stories of huge snakes are so common in old newspaper reports that the term “snake story” was once used interchangeably with “fish story” to indicate an animal of improbable size that was supposedly spotted or killed, but without any proof.

In 1935, the Statesville (North Carolina) Record and Landmark ran an article titled “Giant Snake Story Proves To Be Hoax.” No kidding! In this case, though, the story was about a snake skin 16 feet long, or nearly 5 meters, which was supposed to be from a rattlesnake killed in a local swamp. The article revealed that the two men who claimed to have shot the rattlesnake had later confessed the skin was from a python, and had been sent to one of the men by a relative in South America. At least that one was from a real snake.

Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

Episode 423: Pack Rats and Busy Mice

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Further reading:

Mouse filmed moving items in man’s shed in Bristol

The pack rat:

Show transcript:

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

This week I’m sharing a Patreon episode from last year because I have surgery scheduled. Don’t worry, it’s minor thyroid surgery and I’ll be fine, but my doctor said that a side effect might be hoarseness while I recover. Rather than risk sounding like an old frog, and to allow myself lots of time to rest afterwards, I’ve scheduled Patreon episodes for this week and next week.

At the beginning of this year, in early January 2024, you may have heard about a man in Wales who had an interesting visitor to his work shed. Rodney Holbrook is 75 years old and a retired postal worker, and at the end of 2023 he started noticing something weird. Things in his work shed kept being moved, and not in a way that suggested another person was getting in.

Initially Rodney noticed that some bird food had been moved into an old pair of shoes. This wasn’t just a one-time thing that would suggest an accident, like maybe Rodney had absent-mindedly decided to store the bird food in his shoes, or maybe it just fell there. The bird food kept ending up in the shoes.

Other things kept getting moved too. Small items that Rodney had left out while making and repairing things at his work bench kept getting put into a box, like tools and nuts and bolts. It happened almost every night.

Fortunately, Rodney is also a wildlife photographer, and he just happened to have a night vision camera. He set it up in the shed to find out what on earth was going on.

A mouse was going on, that’s what was going on. This actually wasn’t a huge surprise to Rodney, because years before, in 2019, a friend of his had had the same thing happen.

His friend was Steve Mckears who lived near Bristol, England. Steve kept crushed peanuts in a tub to use as bird food, but he started to notice other things mixed in with the peanuts. First it was just one screw, then it was lots more things that he’d left around his shed. He couldn’t figure out a solution, because he always locked his shed at night.

As Steve said at the time, “I was worried. I’m 72 and you hear of things going wrong with 72-year-old gentlemen in the mind.” Fortunately, Steve’s friend Rodney set up a camera and proved that there was nothing wrong with Steve’s mind or with the shed’s lock. It was just a mouse who was tidying up.

The question is why are these mice tidying up someone else’s shed? Don’t the mice have sheds of their own to clean up? It’s probable that the mice are actually living in the sheds and are wondering why some humans keep barging in every day and making a mess.

Rodents of all kinds do tend to tidy up as part of the foraging and nesting process. Sometimes that means moving debris so the animal can find important items more easily, sometimes it means bringing items back to its nest. House mice and rats will steal small items from humans to make nests, like socks and facecloths. Some rodents are attracted to shiny things and will stash them away or even bury them.

One animal, the pack rat, is so famous for storing items that we call a person who likes to collect things a pack rat. The pack rat lives throughout much of North and Central America and is related to mice and rats. It’s bigger than a mouse but smaller than most rats, and some species have furry tails like ground squirrels. It builds a den out of whatever materials are available where it lives, and its den is complex and usually well hidden. Desert species like to build under a cactus, while others live in cliffs or among rocks, in abandoned buildings or sometimes non-abandoned buildings, under bushes, in the tops of trees, or even in the entrances to caves. The den can be quite large and contains numerous rooms used for food storage, sleeping, and storing all the interesting things the pack rat finds while foraging.

A pack rat constructs a debris pile to hide its den, referred to as a midden. “Midden” is an old-fashioned word used to describe a place where household waste used to be thrown. Archaeologists love middens because you can learn a lot about people by the things they throw away, and other scientists love pack rat middens for the same reason. Some pack rat middens have been discovered preserved for 50,000 years, which has allowed scientists to learn a lot about what plants were growing in the area at the time. Since the middens also contain the pack rat’s fecal pellets, the scientists can also learn a lot about what the rat was eating, how big it was, and so forth.

Pack rats especially like shiny objects and will steal from people. In 2017 when historians were restoring an old home in Charleston, South Carolina dating back to 1808, they discovered several old pack rat middens in the walls of the kitchen. The middens contained buttons, marbles, sewing pins, and even some scraps of paper, including bits of newspaper with a readable date from November 1833. But some of the other bits of paper were torn from a writing primer, a book for people learning how to read or write. That’s not much of a surprise until you remember that this was the early 19th century, that the house was owned by a slave trader, and that the kitchen in particular would have been staffed by enslaved people, who were not supposed to learn how to read. Thanks to the pack rats, we know that at least one person was secretly learning how to read and write. I just hope the rats didn’t do too much damage to their book.

The pack rat is also sometimes called a trader rat, because it can only carry one thing at a time. If it’s carrying an acorn home and it chances upon a shiny gold ring, it will drop the acorn and carry the ring home. But you wanted an acorn, didn’t you, instead of that ring?

As for mice tidying up, we don’t really know why they do it, but it’s probably actually quite common. It just happens at night when people aren’t around, and in the morning they don’t know why all the nails have been moved into the box of nails, but hey, isn’t that handy? It reminds me of the stories of little house spirits called brownies, which were supposed to work at night cleaning and tidying. When the family woke up the next morning, the house or workshop was, ahem, squeaky clean, and all the family had to do was leave out a little cake or cream every night for the brownie.

Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!