E20. Less than 1% of what's in a museum is actually on display. So what's happening with the other 99%? Scott talks with Dr. Sushma Reddy, Breckenridge Chair of Ornithology at the Bell Museum and Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota, about the extraordinary scientific afterlife of a specimen in a drawer.

In this episode:

• How birds collected 150 years ago are answering questions their collectors never imagined, from air pollution to insect decline
• Why falcons turned out to be closer to parrots than hawks, and what other surprises fell out of the bird family tree
• The case for making museum collections more open, especially to scientists from the places these specimens originally came from

If you have a few seconds, please follow, rate, and leave a review for the show. It makes a huge difference in helping others discover it. Thanks for listening!

All audio, video, and images in this episode are either original to Okay, But... Birds (© Okay Media, LLC) or used under license/permission from the respective rights holders. Bird media from the Macaulay Library is used courtesy of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology as follows:

• Bald eagle sound contributed by Gerrit Vyn, ML 200943
• Red-tailed hawk sound contributed by David McCartt, ML 229578
• Gyrfalcon sound contributed by Lucas DeCicco, ML 516973
• Kea sound contributed by William V. Ward, ML 8523
• Small ground finch sound contributed by Robert I. Bowman, ML 86711
• Iiwi sound contributed by Doug Pratt, ML 5888
• Sickle-billed vanga sound contributed by Anonymous, ML 100013

E19. More than 55 million Americans feed birds, and it's not exactly clear the birds asked us to. Dr. Olivia Sanderfoot, Research Scientist and Project Leader of FeederWatch at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, joins Scott to unpack what four decades of data tell us about whether feeding birds helps them, hurts them, or is really just for us.

In this episode you'll hear about:

• Why bird feeding is mostly for us, and the handful of moments when it actually tips the scales for birds
• What forty years of FeederWatch data reveal about shifting ranges, feeder dominance, and the bird that definitely should not be bossing everyone around
• How to keep your yard from becoming an ecological trap, plus the best way to feed birds that doesn't involve a feeder at all

Ready to join the longest-running winter bird monitoring program in North America? Sign up for Project FeederWatch's 40th season at feederwatch.org. You don't even need a feeder.

Want more exclusive clips from this and future episodes. Signup for our newsletter, Bird Droppings, at okaybutbirds.com to get bonus content not available anywhere else!

All audio, video, and images in this episode are either original to Okay, But... Birds (© Okay Media, LLC) or used under license/permission from the respective rights holders. Bird media from the Macaulay Library is used courtesy of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology as follows:

• European robin audio contributed by Matthew D. Medler, ML140049
• Cooper's hawk audio contributed by Wil Hershberger, ML94518
• American crow video contributed by Jay McGowan, ML472843

E18. Turns out "bird brain" is less of an insult and more of a compliment. Scott sits down with Dr. Alex Kacelnik, Emeritus Professor at the University of Oxford, to dig into one of the most mind-bending questions in animal behavior: are birds actually building and using tools, or are we just projecting?

In this episode you'll hear about:

• The experiment that left researchers completely flabbergasted and rewrote what we thought we knew about animal intelligence
• Why flexibility, not raw smarts, is the real test of a thinking mind
• Whether the drive to use tools is something birds are born with, learn, or some surprising combination of both

All audio, video, and images in this episode are either original to Okay, But... Birds (© Okay Media, LLC) or used under license/permission from the respective rights holders. Bird media from the Macaulay Library is used courtesy of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology as follows:

• Woodpecker Finch audio contributed by Robert Bowman, ML82522
• New Caledonian Crow audio contributed by Lucas DeCicco, ML188764
• Hawaiian Crow audio contributed by Tim Burr, ML218670
• Hawaiian Crow video contributed by Timothy Barksdale, ML425081
• Kea audio contributed by William V. Ward, ML8523