322: The Bird Hall w/ Shannon Hackett & John Bates!

Hey there, friends, and welcome to episode 322 of Just the Zoo of Us. This week, I am joined by a power couple from the Field Museum here to talk about the intersection of science, history, and of course, birds in a love letter to the Natural History Museum. We discuss working alongside Sue the T-Rex, specimen pickles, Harlequin romance novels, and explore bigger questions like how museum collections can reveal evolution happening around us right now in real time and help us look into the future, what the average everyday person can learn about themselves and what science actually looks like from a museum, and the hotly contested debate as to whether gray vireos are interesting or not. Just the Zoo of Us presents The Bird Hall with Shannon Hackett and John Bates. hi there everybody it's ellen weatherford with just the zoo of us your favorite animal review podcast. I'm very excited this week. I have not one, but two brand new friends to bring to you today that I'm so excited to talk about because y'all are coming to us from one of my bucket list dream places that I really, I'm actually planning on going next year. So hopefully we'll get to see you guys when I come there next year. Coming from the Field Museum in Chicago, we have John Bates and Shannon Hackett. Hi, everyone. Hi, everyone. I am so excited to talk to y'all. I mean it when I say like the Field Museum is like, it's been on my list for a while since I learned about Sue. Do y'all get to your co-workers with Sue? Basically, that's your colleague, right? Yeah, yeah. We were here when Sue was when Sue came into the museum. Oh, you got you were like onboarding Sue. That's, yeah, actually, we're old. We've been doing this for a long time. But yeah, that arrival of Sue is a really dramatic and I think kind of a transformational time in our institution. institution. It's the first time the museum paid that kind of money for something. But the way Sue was prepared is really different. So she was prepared in a way that every bone, or most of them at least, can be taken out individually. So that there's this skeletal framework thing, kind of a cage that attaches the bone so that if you're a researcher, you can come and say, well, I want to study the rib bones of this T-Rex and they can pull them out for you to study, which I think is really cool. It makes it beautiful too. The fossil itself is pretty. Not the modular T-Rex skeleton, you know, like those like sofas, you can like mix, move them around and put them together. It's like a Lego set. This is a very expensive Lego set. When they prepared Sue, they prepared it in open on a glass fronted lab so you could see Sue being prepared. And so there were some of her was prepared in the Field Museum. Some was prepared at Disney World in Florida because they were part of the consortium that helped the Field Museum buy Sue. And there's a traveling replica of Sue. And I think there's a replica at Disney World too of this fossil, but it was prepared in the open so people could see it, which I think is really great because most people have no idea what goes on inside of a natural history museum. They have no idea that it's like a university behind the scenes. At the Field Museum, there are more than 70 people with PhDs on staff, and they work all over the place and on everything, things you've heard of, like T-Rexes and things you haven't heard of, like bacteria. So Sue lived in Stanley Field Hall for quite a while, and that was my favorite place for Sue because every time you walked into the museum, there she was. And to me, she just looks like a big bird, like a bird that someone put on a photocopier and magnified. There are parts of her skeleton that are very, very much like what a bird skeleton looks like. And so that's what I see when I look at Sue. That's an interesting perspective because I see so often when people see like a bird skeleton or a scan of a bird or something, they think, oh, that looks like a dinosaur. They're like, that looks like a small dinosaur. But because you come to it from the bird side of things, you see Sue and you're like, oh, it looks like a big bird. Most of these dinosaurs are just extinct birds. It's just big old birds. They're just the ones that got left behind. I'm glad that you mentioned that a lot of people don't realize what's going on behind the scenes or what's happening in a museum or really maybe don't have a lot of familiarity with a natural history museum. How did y'all get into this working with birds at the Field Museum? Well, I would say that I grew up in Tucson, Arizona, and my dad was a bird watcher. And so I fell in love with birds because I realized if I wanted to spend any time with my dad or my brother, I better get interested in birds. From there, you know, it went on to a master's degree at the University of Arizona and then a Ph.D. at Louisiana State University where I met Shannon. And, you know, by that point, I realized that I really loved working with museum collections. and Shannon and I did postdocs at the American Museum before she got hired at the Field Museum and they brought me along as we had 1.3 positions when we started. Oh wow oh so you guys have really been like there for the growth of it like going from you know only a few positions to now like Shannon mentioned like having over 70 PhDs. Also another word on birding in Tucson. I had the absolute delight of getting to go. I was visiting my best friend who lives in Phoenix. And I was like, while we're in Phoenix, I have to go to Saguaro National Park. So we drove over to Tucson and we saw the coolest, we saw quails, cactus wrens, and Gila woodpeckers. We saw so many. Did you have any favorites? Yeah, but I shouldn't tell people about it because it's one of the dravest things you've seen. It's called gray vireo. Oh, gray vireo. You know where I've seen those in the game wingspan. No. That bird made it into wingspan? Wow. Hey, John. I'm pretty sure it's in wingspan. That's hilarious. Why is that one your favorite? So I did my master's thesis on them. Oh, okay. Familiarity. No, but it also, it's fascinating because it kind of falls through the cracks. So there are these things like the breeding bird survey, which are designed to estimate what's going on with population trends in North American birds. And they do these random transects across states to census those things. And this bird is found in where oak forest and mesquite begin to mix in the mid-elevations of the mountains. And so they go unrecorded because they're on these breeding bird surveys. And so not much is known about them. And then they spend the winter along the Gulf of Mexico and the Gulf of California and the Baja Peninsula. And so they're just a really cool bird. And overlooked. They don't get the spotlight enough. No. That's why you got to look for the deep cuts. Well, I see anyone tell you, I tend to pick the unassuming ones. You like the sort of wallflower birds. You like the ones you got to kind of work for. This makes no sense to me. He's been all over the world and has seen everything in many continents. And he picks olive-sided flycatcher as his favorite North American bird, which is no offense, olive-sided flycatchers, it's dull. and then gray virios there are road runners there are trogons there are all kinds of things i get into arizona and he picks gray virio you know what though i'm into it because like i do think they need a pr team they need someone in their corner you know especially when you get into like conservation stuff you have that problem a lot of the animals that aren't as attention grabbing and the animals that you don't see as much hype around tend to get overlooked in like conservation. So I am happy when someone is championing them. Somebody has to. Somebody has to. Shannon, how did you get into the work that you do with birds? Not the way John did at all. I grew up in a small town in the mountains of British Columbia, and I was the strange girl. I don't know what that's like. I can't relate at all. I like to pick up logs and kick them over and look for things. And, you know, I wanted to play baseball with the boys and hockey with the boys. And I was told, no, I couldn't stand girl things. I just was never really my thing. In fact, I still have one doll, though. It was in my bedroom. And I never played with toys. My mom said I sorted them in an inexplicable way with whatever was going through my mind. So I think that I was fairly impenetrable for other people because the things I was interested in were just not a thing. And I have a big giant family and nobody had been to university before my brother and I went. So I always tell people I couldn't have been me growing up because I didn't know I existed. I never went to a museum before I went away to university. I didn't know people who had bachelor's degrees. So the only career counseling I got was you're too smart to be a nurse, you should be a doctor. And there's nothing wrong with that. But that's why I love my job so much is because we get to show people that there are lots of careers you can have if you're interested in science. I mean, you have a career that most people don't think about when you're interested in science. And so I was lucky. There's all these chance events that happen in your life that you have to kind of pay attention to. And if something tells you something a whole bunch of times, you might want to think about it. But for me, I ended up taking a course on the natural history of vertebrates of British Columbia. And it was one of the teachers was the curator of birds at the Provincial Museum in Victoria, British Columbia. And we went birdwatching in the labs of that class. And I'd never been birdwatching before. I met a whole bunch of people who, you know, counted birds and got paid to do it. Nobody in my life up until then had ever had a job like that. I didn't know people made a living doing things like that. But I was still going to go be a medical doctor because I didn't know what else to do. I got all the way through an undergraduate degree without even saying anything except hello to a professor. So I didn't take advantage of the things that I tell kids all the time to take advantage of, which is go talk to your professors. They like it. Yeah. You know, now that I'm on the other end of that, those are some of the funnest times is when someone comes and just wants to talk. But this guy who taught this course and was the curator of birds gave me a summer job where you had to computerize and catalog the bird collections. And I'm obsessively, compulsively tidy and organized. And so that was just a mental illness until I had this job where I realized that that attention to detail had a place, like getting amazing pleasure out of lining all the little beaks up in a row in a tray was kind of delightful to me, which I know sounds super weird. It's like that childhood spent sorting and categorizing the toys. Exactly. Right. Where like all the adults around you are like, it's the weirdest thing. I just love sorting and organizing. That was training. It was. That was training. But I didn't know it. You couldn't have known that you were like, this is going to be me someday. Yeah. And then eventually he said, look, you're wasted going to medical school. You need to go to graduate school. And he helped me know what that was. I was really lucky to find him at the right time in my life. And then a couple of months later, I was in an air conditioned car driving by myself from British Columbia to Louisiana to go to school at Louisiana State University where I met John. And so it's just a series of chance events. I didn't know anything about birds. So don't let people tell you you have to be a renowned bird watcher the way John and his family are to study birds because you don't. But there's lots of paths. You've got the legacy bird watcher and then you've got the fresh new kid on the scene. Yeah. But now I'm entranced by dead bird feathers. Could you talk to me a little bit about what y'all's work looks like at the Field Museum? It's always, as Shannon's about to say, it's always a really hard thing to describe. One of the best things about our job is the variety of things we get to do. Not going to get bored. So we're the two curators of a collection that has something like 650,000 birds in it. Every single one of them is accessible online through a digital database. And so we work with a collection staff that's overseeing that collection. We're getting questions about that collection from all over the world via email every day. And then Shannon and I both have the pleasure and honor to be associated with the Committee on Abilitionary Biology at the University of Chicago. And also I'm an adjunct with the Department of Biology at University of Illinois, Chicago. And so we've gotten to advise students from all over the world working on all kinds of different questions about birds. And then when you come, you'll get to see this. We absolutely encourage people to come behind the scenes and see what the collections actually look like. and then we also get to work on things like exhibits. There is an infinite number of projects that you can do when you're in a collection like that. There is actually for real no end because the only thing I know for certain in my life is that whatever I study, someone else is going to come with new technologies and new thinking and look at the exact same specimens and tell more of the stories of these birds. So I feel like we're bird storytellers. You know, we tell the story of individual birds, their populations, their species, everything from how they're related to each other and why they look the way they do, sound the way they do, why they're found where they're found, what parasites they have in them and on them, why it matters. How do birds make color? Why do they make color? Why do they die? What do their genomes look like? there's no end of the things that we do, which is so fun because you're only limited by the number of hours in a day and the money you can get to do certain things. But you know full well, there's never an end to the research that's done on those collections. So for me, the birds are immortal. And I know it sounds weird, but I like the fact that dead birds come into our museum and they get turned into a specimen of some sort. And then they can contribute to science as long as we care for the museum. So to me, that's the only part of my life that's really immortal is those birds. Dead men might tell no tales, but dead birds sure do. They definitely do. I don't know, dead men that are in museums. It's true. We've gotten quite a few interesting tales from dead men. Now, what do these specimens look like? Are these like taxidermied birds? Are they just like little bits of birds? Like what do these specimens tend to look like? They look like all of the above. So yeah, they look like dead birds laying on their backs with their beaks kind of tipped. Classic specimen pose. They've been prepared like this since people started preparing specimens. Their wings are tied together to keep them close to the body so they're not fragile. Their legs are crossed and tied. So the feathers are all there to be seen. We also make skeletons of birds so that you can look at all the, you know, the way all their bones fit together. We collect tissues of birds so that we can understand their genomes. We make pickles of birds, which is a weird word, but it just means you fix them in formalin. It's kind of like a pickle though. You fix them in formalin and you put them in alcohol so that, and they're in a jar. I feel like I've seen so many specimens like this. I never thought of them like that. And now that's going to be stuck in my brain forever. You in a dill pickle. Permanently altered the way that I look at museums. Yeah. And we save the internal parasites, the external parasites. We save the stomachs to understand the digestive systems. We look at the microbiome of the birds the same way that all the things that get done on people. We collect detailed information on locality. There's often pictures. We collect recordings of their vocalizations. we always like to say is the amazing thing about this is we do this because we have no idea what kind of things people will be able to do with these specimens in the future and also like what might be important later for sure it like things that like might not see you like oh no one ever going to need to know like what this feather structure looked like or what this bird toes look like Like you know that not important But you don know like in 10 20 years, someone might be doing a study that's like, hey, we actually need to know what this feather structure looked like. It's going to change our understanding of evolution as we know it. And that happens daily, actually. And that's why our jobs are so much fun. And when our son was little, I remember we're sitting on the step of our townhouse and he said, mommy, what grade are you in? And I counted it up and I said, oh, I'm in grade 23 or some ridiculous number like that. And he said, oh, I'll never be a scientist. And I said, no, I have the, we have the best job because we get to go learn things that we don't know. And then we get to learn things that nobody knew. And that is the funnest thing. The idea that you're at the base of the generation of new knowledge. To be the first person to ever know something. That's right. You're like, I'm the first person to ever know this. That is incredible. And it's so exciting to think of that. And then it's so much fun to tell people about it because what happens when you tell people is that they put it through their own lens and it comes out a different way too. So they're adding their own perspective, which just enriches all of the stories that you can tell about a bird because, you know, science is done by scientists and scientists are really different. And so they approach questions from different perspectives and different ways with different expertise and different tools. And that's what makes it so much fun, this kind of collaborative environment where you're constantly challenging what you think you know and trying to expand, you know, what the world can know. I'll give a really important example of that, which is Our retired collections manager walked around one of the conference buildings in Chicago on the lake called McCormick Place, and he picked up birds during spring and fall migration that had hit windows. And we brought them into the museum, and now we have, you know, 100,000 of these birds. But about 10 years ago now, started with an intern actually analyzing the measurements of these birds that had hit the windows. So across all of bird life in North America, you know, Chicago is an important migratory flyway. So the birds hit buildings. They can't see a glass and think it's a glass. They see it. There's a reflection. They think the environment just continues and they hit the glass. So we, again, in my desire for immortality, when I think about these birds being immortal, they were measured by one person, the same guy. And then there was a huge giant database just waiting to be analyzed. and the results of those analyses probably were the biggest surprise or one of the biggest surprises in my entire scientific career and if you'd have told me that this could happen before we knew it happened I would have said no no way it's not possible which is that most North American birds are getting smaller over the last 40 to 50 years. Whoa oh so and you were able to see that from like the window collisions. Yeah. So you can actually measure them, but some of them are small enough that you don't even need fancy measuring tools to see that they're getting smaller. Your own eyes can tell. If you put the specimens beside each other, you'll be able to tell which one's older and which one's newer because they are getting. And that's, you know, for an average songbird that maybe has a generation time of two or three years, that's, you know, 10 to 20 generations. That's it. that's so interesting but this is happening across multiple species exactly which is why it's so amazing that's the surprising thing to me right like that like it's across the board yeah so that requires a general explanation right if something happens like that that's not just a bunch of one offs and one of the general explanations is that as climates warm as we think climates warm and it's been documented that climates are warming birds may not have to be as big as they used to be and that's okay for a period of time, but Shannon likes to say, what's going to happen in another 20 years if they continue on this trend? Yeah, so it's better if it's hot to be smaller because you have better exchange of heat. So what's happening is that the birds in every measurement except one, which is their wings, are getting smaller. So I look at that and I think, okay, well, they did that over just 10 to 20 generations. What does the next 10 to 20 look like? because we're certainly not controlling how much we're warming the environment. Not well enough anyway. So what happens? Can you be a migratory bird if you get really small? Can you keep getting smaller without changing your wings too? And if you change your wings, can you migrate in the same way? And if the answer is no, then what happens? What happens to a bird? I think earlier this year, maybe it was last year, I had a conversation with Dr. Mark D. Schertz, who studies miniaturization invertebrates. Cool. So he particularly studies like reptiles and frogs, frogs and chameleons and stuff like that. Such a fun person to talk to. And one of the things we talked about in that conversation was that like a big part of what he looks at and studies is like, are there limits to how small you can get without messing up other physiological like things with your body? So with animals like birds that are relying so heavily on things like their density and their muscle mass and like they have like really precarious relationships with like they need these, their body proportions to be right because they're fighting gravity. So I would wonder what does that limit look like for like a songbird or something like how small can they get before they can't get any smaller, but the climate continues to warm and they can't adapt to that because they physically could not get smaller. Yeah, well, they have to move or they have to adapt their physiology to be able to tolerate warmer climates. But most of those things take time. Well, I would have said that getting this much smaller would have taken time. So maybe there's a kind of a variability in the basic body plan of birds that is more resilient than we think it is. I don't know, because we don't really know why they're getting smaller. We kind of know what the correlates of it is, having to do with temperature at certain times of the year on the breeding grounds in particular. So it's not temperature on the wintering grounds that seems to be driving the variation in bird measurements. But that's something we know now. But in 10 or 20 years, I don't know. Do birds stop migrating? Do they stop migrating all the way north? Or do they stop migrating all the way south? What happens to them? If their body gets small enough that eventually their wings go with them. What if they can't make it across the waterways that they often have to fly across? They're going to have to change where they migrate to stay close to land. And then they're going to have to find food along that whole way. Migration is a very risky time for birds when you think about what they do. Some of them fly thousands and thousands of kilometers to go from where they're breeding to where they like to hang out in the winter. That's clearly a big time of mortality of these birds. Being from a place where the geese have stopped migrating, I'm from Florida, which has residential year-round Canada geese that have chosen to simply settle down. They're like, actually, I'm good. Actually, it's pretty all right here. I think maybe I won't do the whole migration thing. So there were populations of Canada geese that would be in Florida year-round. And you could tell, having now moved from Florida to the Pacific Northwest, which also has migratory Canada geese, they are different. They are built different. I'm like, this is a different animal. They have different behavior, different temperament. The ones up here are smaller, noticeably smaller, I think, than the ones in Florida that like don't migrate anymore. That's a subspecies that as recently as 1950, we actually have the best Canada goose collection in the world. It was the life work of a guy named Harold Hansen who works for the Illinois Natural History Survey. But in about 1950 or so, he did a book on giant Canada geese, which is the non-migratory subspecies. And at that time, they actually thought they might be extinct. I can tell you for sure they're not. No, it's one of the most amazing recovery stories imaginable because they literally, he was communicating with people and somebody wrote him from Rochester, Minnesota. And there was a flock of 100 birds that were hanging around Rochester year round. And as far as I can understand this, the entire modern, non-migratory North American population arose out of those 100, 150 birds. Wow. With sheer tenacity. Yeah. Having met quite a few of them, a few representatives of the species, I can tell you if anyone had that dog in them, it was going to be that group of geese. For sure. They've just adapted amazingly to urbanization. So they have no problem being around people. It's an amazing story of adaptation and recovery, actually. I mean, when you think about it, in cities, people don't tend to have shotguns. So they're not going out and shooting things. So a city is a fairly safe place for, you know, for many birds. And Canada geese have certainly taken advantage of that. If you've ever been on a soccer field, you know full well how many Canada geese there are. Even in Jacksonville, where we lived, you could hire border collies. like you could hire people to bring their border collies out to like your campus if you had like a corporate campus or something which geese love a corporate campus a golf course a corporate campus they love it so you could commission a border collie to go and bark at your geese and scare them away which of course is going to work for like what a day maybe two days they're gonna come back they're gonna hang out somewhere on the ponds here they rent out mute swans which are introduced. Oh, a competitor. Yeah, a bigger, meaner bird around its nest. This is a little old lady who swallowed the fly situation because now what are you going to do about your swan problem? What's next? Sue. Yeah, people are listening. They should go and look at some videos of swans and geese interacting with humans. It is absolutely terrifying. Swans are the meanest birds I've ever been anywhere around. They got up on the wrong side of the bed through evolutionary time frames like for millions of years they are just nasty nasty nasty birds and they're huge they're so big it's something about the birds with the long necks it's a long neck is i think rage is stored in the neck because i feel like the longer the neck the more possessed by demons they are do you think that's true of sandhill cranes and things like that too yeah oh yeah in uh in central florida there's a big problem with sandhill cranes seeing their reflections in car doors and then like damaging people's cars because they try to fight their reflection in a car door that you could go on youtube and you can look up like sandhill cranes attacking cars they do it all the time they'll walk right up to cars and a lot of times that they like to hang out in neighborhoods So like they'll walk down the sidewalk and they'll see their reflection in one of the cars in the driveways And then they come up and just start like pecking on the car. So it's like there's a lot They're quite a feisty Well, Tesla's have probably gotten in a lot of video because don't Tesla's have cameras that go on when things are around it so I wonder how many videos there are from Tesla's of Of cranes they're putting the work in this is why great vireos are so cool they've never messed up unproblematic an unproblematic bird there you go they have no enemies they're here to make friends they're beloved by all well they're so boring they'll put you to sleep haters make them famous i don't know i know i'm on the outside of that because people are emailing us telling us how happy they are that John picked all-of-sighted flycatcher as the most interesting bird. I'm like, what the heck is the matter with people? Well, you know what? There's a lid for every pot. There is. I like that one. In the bird hall in the field museum, I'd like to talk about the bird hall. As someone who has not had the pleasure of going, could you tell me a little bit what the bird hall in the field museum is like? Most museums, it's an interesting mix of modern and a cabinet of curiosities, which is kind of what people used to think of museums as being. And it was under that spirit, I think, of a cabinet of curiosities that exhibitions like this were made where you tried to put out examples of as many species as you could. Most museums have taken those down because they think of them as old fashioned. But John and I love the Byrd Hall. We use it to teach from when we've taught ornithology. And for me, well, the name of your podcast is kind of the zoo of us. It's the museum of us too. But the idea that you could go somewhere and see this kind of bird diversity without having to travel, I think is magic. I couldn't go anywhere as a kid. My parents didn't have enough money to take us far-flung places or anything like that. So I had to travel in my mind. I had to travel with books. So, you know, I used to look at picture books of birds. I traveled with, believe it or not, Harlequin romance novels. Excellent. Excellent. Because I read all the books in the library and my parents couldn't afford to buy me books. So I read our neighbor had Harlequin romances and so did my Nona, my grandmother's neighbor. So I read hundreds of, well, maybe thousands of Harlequin romances growing up. And I traveled there too, because they take place all over the world. Listen, my Kindle's full of romance novels. I'm just saying, as a romance novel girly, I get it. I get it. And so I think of that's how I could go places. And I think that the fact that we have those birds in our collections out in display like that to anyone who comes in the museum means that anyone from wherever they come in here from can travel the world by walking through the hall. And we've updated it with modern science, trying to tell people how birds are related to each other and how that is changing based on modern knowledge. So, again, the taxidermy is excellent. And so they withstand the test of time. And just to be clear, they're not prepared like the traditional scientific collections that are upstairs at the museum. They're mounted to look lifelike. And as Shannon's saying, the people that did this, some of those specimens actually date to the 1893 World's Fair, which was in Chicago and is where the Field Museum started. And then initially they were down in Hyde Park to the south of where the museum is today. and in 1921 they built the building that they're in now that you'll get to see when you come to Chicago and those mounts have just kind of some of them have traveled along for all that time and then in the 30s they augmented things with with additional specimens out of the collection and so they're they're about 900 species represented in that room in that hall it's one of the best in the world hey y'all we are going to take a quick break to hear from some of our friends on the Maximum Fun Network. When we get back, we are going to talk about Shannon and John's favorite museum pieces, the dialogue between guests and scientists, and the importance of science communication. So stay with us. how much movies cost nowadays when you add in your popcorn and your bagel bites and your cheese critters you can't go wrong with a henry cattle mustache here at henry cattle mustaches the only supplier the flop house new episodes every saturday find it at maximumfun.org say you like video games and who doesn't i mean some people probably don't okay but a lot of people do so say you're one of those people and you feel like you don't really have anyone to talk to about the games that you like. Well, you should get some better friends. Yes, you should get some better friends, but you could also listen to TripleClick, a weekly podcast about video games hosted by me, Kirk Hamilton. Me, Maddie Myers. And me, Jason Schreier. We talk about new releases, old classics, industry news, and whatever, really. We'll show you new things to love about games and maybe even help you find new friends to talk to you about them. TripleClick. It's kind of like we're your friends. Find us at MaximumFun.org or wherever you get your podcasts. Do you have any favorite pieces? Any favorite? And I know it's like asking you to pick a favorite child, but do you have any favorite? Or like if you're showing someone around and you're like, you've just got to see this, what is your like go-to? You've got to see this one. Go ahead, Sean. You do. I tell people that one of my favorites is that in the back of the hall, there's a fawn-breasted bower bird. Bower. Oh, it's the Bauer. The whole Bauer was brought back sometime around 1930, I think, from New Guinea. And it's put on display and the mail is in the Bauer and it's got these green stones that they put around the outside to attract a female who's come to the Bauer. And it just shows you that with natural history museums, you can, as Shannon was saying, you can transport people to places that they might never get to see otherwise. And I just, I really love that. For people who maybe don't know what we're talking about, could you explain a bower? Yeah, good question. So bower birds have evolved this display technique. And a lot of times birds are shaking their feathers, they're singing. Bower birds actually call. But what happens is the males actually build a structure and the different species build different kinds of structures. And they're basically taking plants and sticks and things and sometimes building literally bowers, which are sticks coming up and joining on the top in a way that apparently has evolved to look attractive to the female. And the female is assessing the quality of the male based on how well it's built its bower and how well it's displaying around. So its quality is reflected in what it puts in its bower, what color berries it's putting in there, what kind of sticks it's putting in there. And now it's using things that humans have left in the environment. And so you'll often see like the blue rings, particular colors, species prefer particular colors, but the blue rings of water bottles, for example, plastic water bottles are often found in Bowers these days. The Bauer behavior is so interesting to me because like, I think for a long time assumed that it was like a nest thing that they were building. It's like, oh, he's making a home for her to live it. Like it's like, it's a functional, like, okay, she wants the better Bauer because it's somewhere she can live in. Like he's making something for her and that's why. But nope, she's like, oh, nope, looks good to me. All right, let's mate and see you later. Yeah, and then she goes off on her own and builds her own nest somewhere. The fact that it's purely aesthetic, like that there's no function to it other than just a flex. It's just how nice can I make this thing look? So in theory, that's a reflection of the quality of the mail, right? how nice of a bower they can build, the quality of the items that are in the bower or around the bower. So in theory, the male is signaling his own quality as a mate. He said, look what I can do. He's not signifying it by how much he helps her raise the babies because he doesn't. But it's an upfront investment. He's not going to follow through. It's an upfront. Yeah. But you know, I love the fact that in 1930, some people working with the museum collected this bower. How? Shipped it back to Chicago. Yeah, they would have probably piled the sticks up having taken a bunch of photos. And then the exhibit folks at the museum, which are just absolutely incredible. It's one of the reasons why the room is so amazing looking. Put it back together so that you can see it. I love that about natural history museums. Anyone who has ever tried to transport a precarious structure, like if you've ever built like a house of cards or something like that, and you're like, oh, now I have to move it into another room. I cannot, to get it across countries, I can't fathom it. I can't imagine what that process would have been. Can you imagine? They must have held their breath the entire time. They were like, don't move. I actually think they probably took it apart and reassembled it. That is dedication to the craft. Which is fascinating to me, too, because in the 1930s, you'd have to, you know, the camera systems were functional, but they weren't great. So you had to get a good picture of it. And then somebody had to sit there and painstakingly, like the bird originally did, put that thing together. An homage to the artist. Exactly. Exhibitions people are amazing at their creativity, resourcefulness, even things like how are you going to display a bird so that it's safe? protected from light, the creativity they use to decide what a mount should be. So we have an exhibition on Kingfishers that's out right now based on some research that I've been a part of for a while. And we spent a lot of time with them asking me how I wanted the birds to look in that exhibition. Like what did I want to see? And then they built little platforms, waveforms stages basically that would hold the bird in the way I wanted people who came in the exhibition to see so they just took my strange ideas you know I want this bird to show its blue feathers for example and they're like okay and then they took the exact specimen and they figured out how to make a mount that put it in the exact right orientation so that when someone looked in the glass case that these birds were in they would see what I wanted it to see well I could never have done that myself. Wow. Do you have any favorite specimens or any particular favorite pieces you really like people to see? Well, I'm probably weirder than the average person because the tree of life that's in that bird hall, one of the ways that we updated it was a tree of life from a project that I was involved in using DNA technologies to try to understand how the major groups of birds were related to each other. And in that context, we realized that a third of the orders of birds, one of the taxonomic classifications, the biggest one, were not all each other's closest relatives. So what I like is that to tell the story of the tree of life for birds, I love to see that tree that's in that exhibition. And that again, was my scientific tree given to people in exhibitions to make it look understandable to the general public, which is another way I really love working with different kinds of people. And then I love going in there and seeing the fact that if you want to see what the relationships are, you got to go somewhere else in the hall. That's how dramatically different our understanding of relationships are. So if you go in there, you'll see grebes by loons, and most field guides have that, but that's not the relationships at all. Grebes are more closely related to flamingos than they are to loons, which is not at all what you would see when you look at them. Not at all the way they're exhibited. They look like siblings. Yes, exactly. But that's not what the relationships are. So if you want to tell someone to follow the tree of life, they're going somewhere else in the hall. And that part is just completely tickling to me. And there's also a video in there that I didn't understand how much it would resonate when we made it, but it's so good. It's about birdwatching and birds and people who do these things. And it's so good that the exhibitions department let a 10-minute video be put into a hall, which I don't think there's nothing else that long anywhere in the museum. And so I love that. I love that someone who worked for us was pregnant with her daughter when we made that, which I also find really... The curator of birds at the Bell Museum in Minneapolis, Oh, nice. And I like that when you go in there, I like to go in there every once in a while, just because there's also something really cool that our exhibitions people did, which is they created an environmental scene that kind of goes with sounds across the top of the hall. So it makes you feel like you're in the trees or in a forest listening to birds. And that is very calming and soothing to me. And I vividly remember John taking those people birdwatching, blowing their minds. And that became what this environmental scene is that kind of is flying around the top of the exhibition cases. So again, these very old, historic-looking cabinets that you associate with museums, wood, with glass, typical things, is augmented by all this creativity of varying kinds of people. So when you take people outside, they look at the world completely differently. And then at the back, we have pictures, paintings of baby birds. Almost nobody sees a baby bird. And these things that we, and we have benches by them so you can sit by at the back of there. It's quiet if you have a kid who you need to calm down. It's a really good place to go. And I love baby shorebirds. They are the cutest things ever. The cute kind of baby bird. Yeah. Yeah. Precocial ones. not the naked ones that look like something out of a horror movie not the scrungly monsters a baby pelican that'll haunt you that that's rough to look at a baby pelican is a little bit challenging to see a baby piping plover is adorable that's the chaser that's the palate cleanser to make you like birds again after seeing a baby pelican because you see a baby pelican you're like i don't know about this actually it kind of goes back to the thing you were talking about earlier how like a lot of times people don't have access to and maybe aren't maybe aren't exposed to and don't know how many different types of careers you can have around science and around like a love for nature or a love for like the natural world but if you are a person who maybe like me struggles with academic science and maybe dropped out of college if you struggle with that side of things because people I think often think that's like it but like you were mentioning these exhibits and the communication of that science and making sure that like helping people learn everything you've learned from the museum involves creativity. It involves being able to work with specimens or being able to make engaging visuals or make a cool video that can be played in a museum. Like there's a lot of avenues for creativity around science. Or engineering. And the museum is like the perfect sort of like convergence of the science and the creativity and like what people I think get a lot of inspiration from, right? Is that like, oh, you can see how this is presented in a way that's very engaging and that helps it's more understandable for like the average person. That's what I feel when I go to in a museum. I'm like, I get so inspired by like all the creativity in the in the exhibits and stuff. And my experience behind the scenes is that there's a lot of engineering that happens. And I love that too. And that's not something I would have thought about too much. What kind of engineering? How do you light it? How do you light things? How do you make things fit in a room? How do you make things aesthetically pleasing, not in an art way, but in a physical way? What materials do you use? How do you put the materials together? What paint colors and what glass do you choose? The logistics, the admin stuff. You know, we ask people what they want to know about some of the things we do, and they're really interested in the process. They want to know how we decide what an exhibit is going to be. More even than what's in it, they want to know how we decided what to put in it. Where did the idea come from? How did we make it? And that was a surprising thing to me. And you have to ask people what they want to know so that you can, you have to start there. You can take them other places, but you have to start in a way that reflects where they are and what they want to know. Have you had any surprising responses from people in the museum? Like when people are in the museum and enjoying the exhibits and seeing things like what are the kind of responses that you hear from people? Like what are there is there anything that particularly you feel like gets people really excited or like really resonates with people? So that's neat. So we have some things. When Shannon and I first got hired, one of the things we wanted to do was if you did surveys in the museum, 50% of the visitors on an exit survey would say that they didn't know that there were scientists there. So one of the things we've done, and this was Shannon really pushed for this for about eight years or so before it finally happened, is we put a window on the DNA lab. I love these. That we have in the museum. I love these. Every time there's a window like this at a museum, I'm so excited about it. It's my favorite part. You know, I didn't want any little girl to ever be told, again, if you're interested in science, you can be a doctor. Maybe you can be a nurse. Maybe you can be a vet. Because what I like about the glass on that is, you know, yeah, it's okay. It's like a reality TV show a little bit. So you get used to it after a while. But what you don't get used to is the fact that when people look through that glass, they see people from all over the world, all different shapes, sizes and colors, speaking a lot of different languages, working on everything, things you've heard of things you've never heard of in completely novel ways. And so it's, you can look through the glass and say, well, I could I could maybe do that. But you can't do that if you don't see it, right? There's nothing special about me. So if I can do what I do, other people can do it too. I'm not smarter than everyone else. I just got lucky. And when you're 20 years old, you're brave. You know, and the other side of this is that people in that lab, it's open to anybody, any of the researchers in the museum and researchers come in from all over to work on various questions. And they're working on mostly material from the collections. But those collections could include lichens, they could include flowering plants, they could include invertebrates. And so it gets at biodiversity from my perspective in a way that I just never really appreciated until we actually did it. I mean, I wanted to have people see that science was being done, but you can really get across too that science is being done on lots and lots of different parts of biodiversity. Right. I think people have an assumption that like a museum, especially when it's a museum, when it says like it's a museum of natural history, people assume that this is all just past stuff. Like this is all like that all of the research or all of the maintenance is being done on just preserving the past. And I think people don't realize how much, like you mentioned, like this thing about looking at the sizes of birds now and comparing them to like the sizes we've seen in the past. So like, I think people don't realize how much active, current and forward looking research is being done in a museum. I also love when I'm at, I've seen them at the Burke Museum and at the Florida Museum of Natural History, they had some labs like this too. They had like an insect lab where you could see entomologists like working on bug stuff. And my favorite part is seeing the scientists working in the lab. It's so humanizing of the process of science to me that like I think science seems for a lot of people seem so far off and like vague and like you don't imagine actual human beings doing like the scientific process or doing like lab work or anything. I think a lot of that is just like the inaccessibility of like scientific literature. It's hard to read. And it's not usually communicated in like a way that normal people talk like conversationally. So it seems so far off and inaccessible. But when you see, when you're at a museum and you look through a window and you see someone just doing their job and you can see maybe they've got like a t-shirt for a band they like, or maybe they've got like stickers on their water bottle that are like from a show you also watch, you know, like it's a moment where you can be like, hey, I also like, it makes them feel like more like, oh, there's actual real like people that exist in the world that are doing science. It's not just like a nebulous, faceless thing. That's absolutely what we've tried to do. Yeah. Before COVID, we had what we call talk to the scientist hour from 11 to 12. Every weekday, we would put headsets on and answer questions from the general public. We picked that time because we worked with teachers and that was the best time for field trips. And what you realize when you do that is people have a lot of science questions and museums are considered safe spaces to ask a question. So for me, that's kind of a sacred obligation we have to let them ask us. So before we made this place called the DNA Discovery Center. And before we did it, we did polls of people who came into the museum and asked them what they knew about DNA. And what became really obvious is that almost 70% of the people who came in the museum didn't know what DNA was, didn't know where it was. So they didn't understand their bodies are made of cells. They didn't understand that inside of every cell is two different places if you're an animal and three if you're a plant. They didn't realize any of that. So you can't tell people what I do with DNA when they don't even know what it is. So we had to start from the basics of teaching people what DNA was and where it is. And then we could advance to kind of how people inside of a museum study DNA, how we use DNA. And when we would open the mics up, well, we first off we got regulars right away people who would come back all the time to talk to us which was I wasn expecting that but it was also very it was just so nice It like a dialogue Yeah. Well, it's a relationship, right? Yeah. It's a relationship. People, when you talk to people like that, they know who you are and you're not, it's real. And you know who they are. Yeah. So people would come with all of their questions. You know, some of them at first stumped us, how many bones there are in a human body. We all had to go look that up. But eventually, you know, people would come in with questions about a breast cancer diagnosis, for example, and they were too afraid to talk to their doctor about what this genomic test meant. So they could come and ask us and we could tell them not in a doctor sense, but we could tell them the things that we know about DNA and encourage them with a bit of knowledge then to go back and actually talk to their doctor about it. People would bring their 23andMe things in and talk about how do you do this? How does this thing work? How do you know where I'm from with this? And we were there to answer people's questions. And so we're not so scary because we're not wearing white lab coats, right? And we're not working alone, which is if you ask a kid to draw a scientist, they'll draw a middle-aged white man with gray hair working by themselves. And that's not at all what you see, right? So if you look behind the... That's what I look like. Now, you didn't then. But, you know, you'll see a high school intern standing next to me. And we're all the same in these spaces. There's nothing special about what I might want to do compared to them. I think it's really important to let people experience behind the scenes. Yeah. I don't know. I feel like this is really capturing a lot of the magic that I feel like when I've been like as a lifelong museum girly, it feels so like inspirational. It feels like such a, like a deep connection to like the world around you and to science without having, like you said, for people who don't necessarily have the means to travel the world, right? Like maybe you've got a family to take care of and, you know, your, your circumstances don't allow you to get out and go fly all over the planet and see all these amazing things, but you can really connect, I think, with the world around you at a museum. So for people who maybe are thinking of coming to visit the Field Museum, who are able to, like me, do y'all have any tips or any upcoming events or anything that you want people to know about when they're thinking about coming to see the Field Museum? Well, I have a couple things. Come early in the morning. First thing, it's quieter. It's less hectic. So your kids won't get so incredibly overstimulated that they make you lose your mind, which can really happen when the museum is really full. So I like it first thing in the morning. It's calm. It's quiet. You can still go get food or whatever, but come early. Bring your walking shoes. That's true. Oh, yes. Our museum is a big place. Yeah. And don't expect to see it all. I mean, that's okay, too. There are corners of our museum that I still haven't seen in 30 years. And you don't have to pay for special exhibitions to do fun things. And that's what I would tell you. The bird hall is there with your admission. You don't have to pay extra. The DNA Discovery Center is there. You don't have to pay extra to see it. So don't feel like you have to. It's expensive enough, believe me. And if I were people, I would walk from wherever they are. Stay somewhere close to a museum where you can walk because the parking is way too expensive. It's crazy. But, you know, you can go through that museum. Every time you go through, you could appreciate something different. There are docent-led tours too. So if you want help understanding something or you want to go through the museum in a particular way. You can look at the website and figure out when there are docent-led tours and see if you can get involved in that. And then the biggest thing I would tell people is if you live anywhere near here, become a member of the Field Museum because two nights of the year we open up behind the scenes and it's called Members Night. And you can go all over the museum behind the scenes and there will be exhibitions and specimens all over the place. And you'll see all the different kinds of people and all the different kinds of specimens because less than a half of a percent of our collections are actually on display so all the good stuff's behind the scenes oh that's the top shelf stuff like we keep the good stuff in the back yes yeah that's i see i i would disagree no you wouldn't come on no i'm not i don't know i mean what you can see on display is it is but and the stuff behind the scene is is we don't have one ostrich behind the scenes we don't have a mounted ostrich behind the sea. It's too big. No, but we have a skeleton. Except for the skeleton that we have. You ought to put that next to Sue. That's hilarious. So we actually have a bunch of mounted skeletons in an exhibit called What is an Animal? And the thing that just amazes me about those bird skeletons is they all date to the 1893 World's Fair. They came from Ward Scientific, which is a company that went around the world way back in the late 1800s to put together these things and then had, like we've been saying all along, these experts that were capable of mounting these things in a way that made them usable for well over 100 years. It's not easy to put all the bones in a bird back together and make it look like a bird. I can't imagine. I do not have the patience to painstakingly, because they're all woven together with really thin wire. So there's little holes in bones, and then there's little really, really thin wire that goes through them to tie them together. And that is someone who has very good eyesight and steady hands and a lot of patience. I really enjoy seeing mounted skeletons or seeing skeletons of other animals, especially animals that are morphologically, when you look at them they're very they're laid out very different from a human but I really enjoy seeing all the weird little similarities because it helps me understand like the animal's sort of like anatomy as it like relates to myself more so like one that really surprises me a lot is like flamingos I had always assumed that the bend in the flamingo's legs was their knee because it seems like it's about where our knee is but it goes the other way so I thought I was like oh that they just have backwards knees, I guess. That's their knee and it just bends the other way from us. And then I found out that no, that is actually their ankle and their knee is in a very strange place. You wouldn't know that from like, without seeing the skeleton. So when I see an animal skeleton, I'm like, oh, that's what's going on in there. When I see some of those things, I think of how amazing flight is. So if you look at a hummingbird, their skeletons are little teeny tiny things but the keel the breastbone on a hummingbird is enormous compared to the body size of that bird so what that means is that you look at that and you can see immediately how big the muscles have to be for to make something that can hover the way hummingbirds do so if you were a hummingbird your breastbone would stick out three feet from your body that's a density that's how big the muscles would have to be for you as a human to hover like that. So nature is awesome. And the evolutionary process has left us many treasures. Well, for anyone who wants to hear more from y'all, can we talk about birds of a feather talk together? Oh, we'd love to. Yeah. That started in the weirdest way possible, which is if you come behind the scenes, I know nothing is linear, right? People think you go from point A to point B to C. Well, nothing I've ever done in my life works that way. So John gave a tour of Lake Cook Audubon Society to two new bird watchers, one of whom works in media production, and the other one writes copy of medical literature for executives. And you can see what happens when you show people birds up close. They're transfixed by what it is. And the thing I love about this case we have set aside is that every person who gives a tour, uses the exact same specimens and tells completely different stories. It's fantastical. And so John gave them a tour and they were entranced by him, which I've seen happen a thousand times because he's really good at telling these stories. And they came back and said, well, would you consider doing a podcast? And I said, no, I hate the sound of my own voice. not a chance in hell that I was going to do that. But then now I also do not like this out of my own voice. It is unfortunately, that is just part of the territory. And I thought I would get used to it after having done this for six years. And it didn't happen. I'm still not used to it. I still don't like it. I feel like I have to listen to it because I have to know how poorly I might be speaking. But every time I want to filter out, I just like, oh my gosh, do I really sound that way? But anyways, so they convinced me because, you know, it's a time in my life where I thought, well, I could, I should do something different. And because podcasts have saved me plenty of times over the last 10 years, where taking me other places and you get an intimate relationship, you must feel this with the people who listen to you. They get to know you. And it's really different from watching TV or hearing people on a radio. It's a very intimate thing. And I really liked that. And I wanted to give people a different commute on their way home than listening to the news or whatever. I want them to go somewhere else and have maybe the time in traffic where if you're from Chicago, you're very used to driving in traffic. I wanted their commutes to be easier. But it turned out I completely love doing it because it reminds me all the time of why I love birds. You know, we pick a species and we talk about a species every episode. amongst the four of us. And we each have completely different perspectives that we bring to it. We're the nerds and RJ and Amanda are the beginning birders who are figuring stuff out. And so it's, yeah, that's been a lot of fun. Oh, raising the next generation of birders. Yeah. Passing the torch. Yeah. And for me, you know, my mom has a brain disease and it's hard for her to do technological things these these days, but she will put her brain towards finding our podcast and listening to it. And what she says is that I sound happy when I do it. And I actually feel that I feel happy when I do it. And so it makes her happy that I'm happy doing it. So there's no way I'm stopping when it makes my mom happy. Oh, that's very nice of your mom to listen to your podcast. I know. My mom doesn't put you to sleep. But no. And then I also feel like my dad died before there was a lot of cameras and we just not very much moving video of him or sound of his voice. But, you know, I feel like through these podcasts, our son has a very good record of who we are and what we care about. And lots of lots of chances to roll his eyes. Yeah. Do you think that's the museum curator brain that's like activating like oh good there's record of my of who I am normally I wouldn't want that but the yearning to have those representations of people in my life who are dead now make me overcome my hatred of thinking of myself like that because I feel like it's a gift to him to be able to listen to us whenever he wants to that's a really cool way of thinking about that. Do y'all have any particular favorite episodes you've done for people who might want to go check it out? Any episodes you would recommend that people start with? We did a series on The Feather Thief, which is a really interesting book that I would tell people to read. It sounds like a fantastical made up novel. It does sound very fantasy. Yeah, it's a true story of a break-in at the British Museum of Natural History by a fly tie fisherman who stole birds to make fly ties with. Who knew there was a fly tie underground? A black market? There is. It's really bizarre, but it is. And so a single bird could be worth $100,000, if not more. Anyways, and so a really great guy named Kirk Johnson wrote a book called The Feather Thief. And it's a very, very fun, interesting book. And we did a series of episodes on that book. And then because John knows Kirk, he grew up around here and he's been in the museum and he interviewed John for this book that he came on for the last episode we did of the book to talk to him about it. Wow. Straight from the source. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And I just want to put in a plug for the Olive Sided Flycatcher episode. Yeah. This is the most married couple that's been married for like a very long time energy of having this like running beef as like you have this one thing that I'm just so over I mean I always try to pick something that I think most people haven't ever heard of yeah so there's lots of episodes that are like that so when we suggest them to Amanda and RJ they go I didn't I didn't know that existed so there's a whole series of things that are, I didn't know. We just did an episode on a spoon-billed sandpiper, for example, and nobody knows what a spoon-billed sandpiper is, but... I know those two words individually, but not together. Yeah. So, yeah. So there's an episode on that bird that's one of the most endangered species of birds in the world, you know, and it has a beak that's shaped like a rosy spoonbill. Who knew? Yeah. That seems like just a one-time thing, right? Doesn't that seem like something evolution would have only spat out once and been like, that was an experimental thing. We were trying something weird. And John did this. We put a few shorts together and I think we need to do more of it because people really like it in the museum with the collections. And John did one on one of our favorite examples of convergent evolution with a meadow lark and a long claw from Africa that are, they look really similar to yellow with a brown bib and streaky backs and, but they're not, they're not related to each other, but they look almost identical. And so for some reason, And people, they're just amazed at that, right? They're captivated by the fact that convergence could produce two things that look so similar. So I like to tell people things that, you know, they're not going to find on average on their own. And there's so many birds that fill that niche. Even gray virios. Even gray virios. Exactly. There we go. Someone's got to. Especially gray virios. Thank you both so much. It was so awesome talking to you. I feel so like motivated and I have that feeling of like inspiration and wonder that you get from museums. I'm so excited to plan my trip to come out to Chicago to see the Field Museum next year. I hope to see you guys there. You will. I will also have links to all of your, I will have links to your podcast and where people can find more from y'all in the episode description. So anybody listening can scroll down and just click through there. Thank you both so much for joining us. I had so much fun. I learned a lot about the museum process, learned some new stuff about birds that I didn't know. So thank you both so much for being here. Thank you. It was a lot of fun. And thank you to all your listeners for putting up with us. I think you're among friends here. I think that maybe some of our listeners spent their childhood organizing and sorting. I bet you not. thanks y'all both we'll talk to you later bye bye everyone bye thank you all so much for listening i hope you are feeling inspired to put on your comfiest walking shoes get a bright and early start and hit up your favorite natural history museum if you liked what you heard i would love it if you left behind some kind words for us in a review on your podcast app of choice if you'd like to come hang out with us online we're on facebook instagram discord and blue sky links to everything will be in the episode description. You can also send me an email at ellen at just the zoo of us.com. 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