Loading...

PODCAST

Okay, But... Birds

Dr. Scott Taylor

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

science nature

All Episodes

33:25

Okay, but what happens when a bird gets sick?

Okay, But... Birds ·

2026/10/01

E42. Birds get sick too, and a lot of what happens next looks surprisingly familiar. Dr. Andrea Townsend of Hamilton College has spent two decades following American crows through outbreaks, and she walks Scott through what illness really does to a bird, from the family it belongs to down to the clever brain it depends on.In this episode, you'll hear about: The surprising way crows choose their partners, and what it costs them when disease comes around What a stomach bug does to one of the

en

32:19

Okay, but griffins, and ligers, and birds, oh my!

Okay, But... Birds ·

2026/09/24

E41. Centaurs, mermaids, minotaurs: we have been inventing creatures that are two things at once for as long as we have told stories. Birds do it for real. Dr. Glaucia Del-Rio of the Florida Museum of Natural History studies two Amazonian antbirds that meet where a river runs out, and what their offspring say about where one species ends.In this episode, you'll hear about: Why a river can be an impossible barrier for a bird with perfectly good wings, and what researchers found when they carried

en

32:18

Okay, but... cranes!

Okay, But... Birds ·

2026/09/17

E40. There are only 15 crane species on the planet, and 11 of them are in trouble. Dr. Andy Caven, Director of Central Flyway Programs for the International Crane Foundation, has spent his career on two of them: the sandhill cranes that pour into one stretch of Nebraska's Platte River every spring, and the whooping crane, which came back from the edge and is still nowhere near safe. Scott asks him what it actually takes to keep a bird like that on the landscape, and the answer runs through soggy

en

31:21

Okay, but why does that bird look so rough?

Okay, But... Birds ·

2026/09/10

E39. Every August the questions start: there is a cardinal at the feeder with no head feathers, and it looks terrible. Nothing is wrong with it. It is molting, which every bird does at least every year. Dr. Ryan Terrill of the San Diego Natural History Museum studies what a feather endures over a year and what it takes to replace one, and he makes the case that the few weeks a bird spends looking its worst may be the most consequential weeks it has.In this episode, you'll hear about: Why the

en

32:49

Okay, but what's up with feathers?

Okay, But... Birds ·

2026/09/03

E38. You have pulled one out of a jacket sleeve at a bad angle, picked one up on a walk, and you are almost certainly within arm's reach of a few thousand of them right now. Dr. Cody Limber, who recently finished his PhD at Yale, spent it taking growing feathers apart one cell at a time to find out what they are actually made of. A feather is not a fancy scale, it does not grow the way you would guess, and after all this time nobody can say what the first ones were for.In this episode, you'll hear

en

30:49

Okay, but does age bring Wisdom?

Okay, But... Birds ·

2026/08/27

E37. A bird called Wisdom was banded on Midway Atoll in 1956 and is still laying eggs today, which makes her at least 75 and the oldest known wild bird on the planet. She has also outlived the man who banded her, and most of the scientists who tracked her since. Dr. Etienne Rouby studies long-lived seabirds at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at CU Boulder, working with data from the French sub-Antarctic islands where wandering albatross have been followed for more than half a century

en

31:28

Okay, but do hummingbirds ever chill?

Okay, But... Birds ·

2026/08/20

E36. Hummingbirds run one of the fastest metabolisms of any animal with a backbone, which is why we picture them as permanently buzzing. Scott sits down with Dr. Anusha Shankar, assistant professor at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, who studies how hummingbirds budget energy in a world that keeps moving the goalposts. It turns out the blur at your feeder is the exception, not the rule.In this episode you'll hear about:Why the same bird might spend three hours a day flying, or thirteen,

en

36:26

Okay, but what's the deal with Darwin's finches?

Okay, But... Birds ·

2026/08/13

E35. Eighteen species of small brown bird on a pile of volcanic rock have taught us more about how evolution actually works than almost anything else on Earth. Not because Darwin figured them out. He didn't. Because a handful of scientists went back, banded every bird on one island, and watched it happen in real time. Scott heads to the Galapagos with Dr. Erik Enbody, Assistant Professor of Computational Biology at Cornell University, to find out how one ancestor became eighteen, why the beak is the

en

29:12

Okay, but what's the deal with nests?

Okay, But... Birds ·

2026/08/06

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

en

26:23

Okay, but how do birds handle a heatwave?

Okay, But... Birds ·

2026/07/30

E33. When the air temperature climbs past a bird's own body temperature, staying cool stops being free and starts to cost them water they may not have. Dr. Blair Wolf, University of New Mexico, has spent his career studying how desert birds survive heat that should kill them, and what happens when it finally gets too hot.In this episode you'll hear about:Why some backyard birds can shrug off oven-like temperatures while others just a few feet away don't make itThe strange, water-saving trick birds

en

31:12

Okay, but how does wildfire smoke impact birds?

Okay, But... Birds ·

2026/07/23

E32. Wildfire smoke is blanketing more of the map every year, and it turns out a smoky sky changes everything for birds, from how they breathe to whether we can find them at all. Dr. Olivia Sanderfoot, Research Scientist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, is back to walk Scott through what all that haze is doing to the birds living in it.In this episode:Birds don't breathe the way we do, and that single fact shapes everything about how smoke hits themStay, shift, or go: the framework for what a bird

en

29:50

Okay, but did birds invent music?

Okay, But... Birds ·

2026/07/16

E31. If a bird sings a phrase worthy of Beethoven, is that music, or just biology in a nice outfit? Dr. Hollis Taylor, a violinist, composer, and ornithologist, has spent more than two decades recording and transcribing the songs of the Pied Butcherbird, an Australian songbird whose vocal life keeps blurring that line.In this episode:How a single pied butcherbird can sing for seven hours through the night, almost never repeating itself, then return the next spring with a brand new repertoireWhat a

en

35:02

Okay, but is the dawn chorus getting quieter?

Okay, But... Birds ·

2026/07/09

E30. That wall of birdsong outside your window at sunrise has a name, a structure, and a surprising amount of drama. This week Scott talks with Dr. Dan Mennill, a professor at the University of Windsor who wires whole forests with microphones to eavesdrop on the entire neighborhood at once, about what the dawn chorus is actually for, and what it means when it starts to thin out.In this episode:Why dawn, why so loud, and who gets to sing first (hint: it's not about who's the best singer)What 16

en

34:27

Okay, but what's it like as a bird at the top of the...

Okay, But... Birds ·

2026/07/02

E29. Standing at 11,000 feet, lungs burning, Scott watched birds go about their afternoon in the exact thin air that had nearly taken him out. This week he sits down with Dr. Chris Witt, evolutionary biologist at the University of New Mexico and curator of birds at the Museum of Southwestern Biology, who has spent his career figuring out how birds make a living in the thinnest air on Earth. From the hummingbird blood that rewrites itself to match a mountainside to a five-pound coot that has no

en

32:34

Okay, but does easy living make birds dumber?

Okay, But... Birds ·

2026/06/25

E28. A bird's brain is the most expensive thing it owns, and evolution doesn't hand one out for free. Dr. Carlos Botero, Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin, has spent a decade tracing what variable, unforgiving environments actually do to bird cognition, and the answer flips a lot of conventional wisdom on its head.In this episode:Why the harshest places on Earth produce two kinds of birds: the puzzle-solving geniuses and the brute-force survivors, with almost nothing in

en

33:13

Okay, but... pigeons!

Okay, But... Birds ·

2026/06/18

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

en

35:02

Okay, but did birds originate the open relationship?

Okay, But... Birds ·

2026/06/11

E26. We borrowed a phrase from human dating and tried to pin it on birds. Turns out they never needed the rulebook. Dr. Wenfei Tong, biologist and author of Bird Love, joins Scott to unpack what bird partnerships actually look like once you stop projecting our scripts onto them, from females who run the territory to males who guard their paternity in deeply weird ways.In this episode you'll hear about:Why the drabbest little brown bird in the garden has one of the wildest sex lives in the animal

en

34:28

Okay, but... boobies!

Okay, But... Birds ·

2026/06/04

E25. The blue-footed booby has become an internet personality: cartoon feet, a goofy strut, a name that practically begs to be a punchline. But Scott sat down with Dr. Carlos Zavalaga, Universidad Científica del Sur, and one of the people who first taught him how to study seabirds in Peru, and the "fool" reputation falls apart fast. Get a booby in the air or underwater and you're watching one of the most specialized hunters in the bird family tree.In this episode you'll hear about:How six-plus booby

en

32:50

Okay, but what about birds that can't fly?

Okay, But... Birds ·

2026/05/28

E24. Flight is the thing we associate most with birds, so what does it mean when a lineage gives it up? Dr. Scott Edwards, Harvard, joins Scott to unpack how flightlessness evolves, why it keeps happening across the bird family tree, and what the genome reveals about how a bird loses the ability to fly.In this episode you'll hear about:How losing flight reshapes a bird's body, from feathers to forelimbs to that one famously enormous eggWhy the answer wasn't where geneticists expected to find itWhat

en

33:01

Okay, but can a bird really cooperate with humans?

Okay, But... Birds ·

2026/05/21

E23. Across sub-Saharan Africa, wild birds and people work together to find honey. No taming, no breeding, no domestication… just a partnership thousands of years in the making. Behavioral ecologist Dr. Jessica van der Wal, FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology, joins Scott to unpack what's actually happening when a honey hunter calls and a greater honeyguide answers.In this episode you'll hear about:What each side gets out of one of the only known mutualisms between humans and a wild animal,

en

45 results

Similar Podcasts

The Deep Dive Lab: Unraveling Materials Science

Son Hoang

New Books in Political Science

New Books Network

Station 151

Pale Matter | Realm

Beyond the Divide

Koala Moon

StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson

Neil deGrasse Tyson