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Mark, how are you?
I'm not great a sore throat.
I think I'm coming down with a cold.
Oh no, you should try a Vogel sore throat spray. It's a natural remedy with achination and sage and can treat symptoms of coals and flus, including sore throats.
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Oh hey, it's still the guy who runs the local board game night, hoping someone shows up with the pizza place to game Ali Ward Boy, Hootie. Once again, it's part two of Striga Formology Owls. Many of you noted last week that I missed the opportunity to say alogies, and that made me feel bad because you're right. Also, you were like, does this have the same root word
as an Italian witch? And I'm glad that I have the chance to clear that up in this episode, which we do, especially since I am an Italian lady who collects rocks and I have animal teeth and jars. But if you haven't listened to part one, I don't know why you're here first, because you got to go back and you got to meet Rocky. You gotta find out what an owl is, So go back to part one. We'll see you back here when you're finished. Everyone else, you made it in order. You waited a week, and
now we're at the thrilling conclusion of Owls. But before we swoop into it, thank you to all the patrons who submitted questions for this episode via Patreon dot com slash ologies. This entire episode is all your questions and you two can join for one dollar a month if you're not. Thank you to everyone who's out there in ologies merch fromologiesmarch dot com and if you need kid friendly no swearing episodes, you can find them in their
own feed called smologies wherever you get your podcasts. It's also linked in the show notes. And thank you, of course to folks who review the show for zero dollars and you know I read them all, such as this freshy from Escabe who wrote a litmus test slip in amazing information about slug doongs at a dinner party and see who's eyes light up? That's your new friend. Thank you,
Ali Ward Escab Cornermie near the spinach dip any day. Okay, so let's get into struggle Formology Owls Part two, wherein we will discuss what to say to an owl, what not to say, exorcist heads, omens wisdom, nesting season, Stolen Hats, homicide trials, the spotted owl versus barred owl. Great debate, this guest's favorite owl and the one he wants to
see the most in real life. If a group of them is actually called a parliament and so much more with your favorite owl guy forormologist, doctor r J. Rocky gutierres whoms we love. Can I ask you some questions from listeners? Are you doing okay? I know I've kept you all.
I've got all the time you want.
Okay, amazing?
I love this.
Oh okay, some questions from listeners, and we have so many good ones.
Hi, Ali, this is Leilani Ramirez from Los Angeles. This is my first time asking a question, so I'm really excited to learn more about owls. I had a question about their hands feet. I'm not really sure what you would call them, but I guess their talents. I've heard that they can rotate one of their talents, so they can have them in either two to two or a three to one configuration, which I guess is why they
walk so differently from so many other birds. I was wondering if all owls have that, or if there are some that don't, and how exactly that adaptation is beneficial for them. Thank you so much.
So. Yeah, do they have four claws that they switch around to configurations?
Yeah, they have four claws and the person is correct, but it's the how to toe is reversible, so they can put two forward and two back, and so they when they come down, they can like grab them on and have a much more secure grip on whatever they grab a hold, so.
They can go three up top, one on bottom, or they can swing that thing around for a two and two, so like three dagger fingers and a spike themb or like a spock claw of death. We'll chat more about it in terms of forensic science in a bit.
So that is one of the unique features of these things that they can in fact have that reversible outer toe and have two forward and two back. And the other interesting things about about owls in their talons is they're usually adapted to the sides of the prey that they take. When you see us great big owl like a great gray owl, they have relatively small talons because they're taking meadow voles and mice and small mammals, and
so they don't need great big talents. And you look something like a spotted owl, which is quite a bit smaller than a great gray they have really big talons and they're catching an animal that's a third their size or wood rats is their primary prey, so they're cratching huge animals in relationship, and so it's like four stilettos going right into the body of or eight. Actually when you talk about both talons, and again you know, depending on the size of the owl, they have different strength
at which they can apply to the prey. And people have actually measured this. So the amount of force that is required to release say a little owl like a borrowing owl, is something called five newtons. Well that's no more than saying it's like, you know, one point one pounds pressure. So if you apply one point one pounds of force against this, you can open up the talons of a little tiny owl and what it feels like
is somebody pinching you. Like one time an owl hit the window my wife Kati, she went out to retrieve it. Actually didn't look at it, she just saw it was
a bird. And the first thing, and this is a tip for the audience, if a bird ever hits your window and you don't know if it's a live or dead this gently pick it up by the whole body, put it in a box on top of a towel, and then close the box up and put it in a quiet, dark place and just leave it there for you know, four or five hours, because owls are amazingly resilient when they hit windows if they don't outright kill them, oftentimes they won't die of shock if you put them
in there and they have a chance to relax and be.
Quiet, and always a good idea non pros to call your local wildlife rehabber as soon as you can to get some advice too. But yeah, many say that a quiet dark box or even a paper bag helps the little birdies calm down. And if you start to hear like the a pitter patter of feet inside, they may be awake and ready to kind of pop out and then chill out. But in that time they likely don't
need food or water. But if you provide it, don't try to jam it down their little throats like a beer bong, because they could choke or they'd be pissed at you. Also, to prevent the bird strikes in the first place, you can look into things like window films they have like dots or patterns, or you can use a glass marker I read to put a grid of dots on your own window. You could turn the lights
off at night. You can hang things up in your windows and according to this twenty twenty three paper, evidence consequences and angle of strike of bird window collisions up to five point two billion bird fatalities maybe happening in just the United States, with potentially billions more worldwide every year. So we'll link some resources on our website because we all want birds to like us. And it can still
happen even to professionals, even to professional bird people. But you can help these little fellas out, like Kat did after this strike.
Well, anyway, she picked up this little owl and she snatched her, you know, and grabbed her by the finger, you know. And so then she realized, oh, I got a live one here. So it was a little pigmy ow, and she pulled the talons apart and then went into the house, and of course it lived in, which we're happy about. But other species, like the great horned owl, when it lashes onto something, it takes about thirty pounds of pressure to pull him apart, and so spotted owl
is like fifteen eighteen pounds of pressure. Now, one time we were working in New Mexico and a graduate student from another university had called me up and asked me if I would show him how to catch owls and work with owls because he wanted to do a study on him, and his major professor was not an owl person. I said, sure, And of course this happens a lot in academia. Students from other universities will call up somebody and ask him for some assistance, and very typically everybody
helps everybody else most of the time. And so I went out to New Mexico because I wanted to get some blood and tissue samples for a genetics study I was doing with my colleague George Baraclaw.
Well.
To make a long story short, his major professor wanted to see us catching up out and so we went and caught this owl, and he finally caught it and I ran over to get it. So I just grabbed its foot and it just latched onto me, and it put its talons all the way through the fat part of my hand, between my forefinger and my thumb, and there's, of course, there's blood everywhere. And the kid's major professor he walks up looking at us, and he says, does that hurt? I said no, I said, I said, no,
it doesn't hurt at all. But when you start pulling this thing apart, you know you have to be very careful because you don't want to hurt the owl. That you have to apply this pressure and you can just see the owl looking at you and thinking, I am not letting go of you unless you let go of me. Oh wow, yeah, so that that happens.
You know, you're just in a tense stand up.
You're not a true howler can get.
Nailed, okay, but what if you are, say, pet sized, wondered doctor Primo de la Kata, a retired organ grinder, as did other patrons Shana s, Alison Menard, and Nicki Lawrence, who wanted to know if the spiky jacket small dogs were really can deter an owl. Nick Lawrence also mentioned that they are concerned about a local muskrat getting attacked
by an owl. So the issue of how much a larger owl can lift in its hook talents seems hotly debated and I found a lot of conflicting information, but the general advice seems to be keep your little guys on a leash unless they're a wild muskrat. But the consensus is on the spiky vest for little dogs that can't hurt at least it can't hurt as much as a bird can, And now that we know that, I would like to take a moment to share some stories from listeners who wrote in via Patreon dot com sashologies
because they were good ones. Lauren Cuff noted that I live in Vancouver, PC and there's a park where barred owls have been known to dive bomb humans, sometimes even scraping their talents and causing in trees. Kathyin Buckley said, my dad got swooped at and attacked by an owl on his walk a few days ago. Is this normal? Was it the fact that he's bald? Catherine notes that he did get a tennis shot afterwards and is completely fine,
and so is the owl, so that's all good. Ads the erminologist, wanted us to know that when driving a four wheeler on a farm one night, at the last minute with their head lamp, they saw a great horned owl came at their face with claws upblazing. Ads says, I did get some nasty cuts and a scar on my chin. Is this normal behavior? Was it attracted to
the light and thought my face was prey. It did fly away very quickly when my arms went crazy, Ad says, And then Kathleen Carlson said, a couple of years ago, I was trail running in the winter February on Vancouver Island before sunrise, which already Kathleen like, good, good for you, and then an owl swooped right over us and made contact with my friend's head with its wing. We turned around and it followed us through the tree canopy for
about five hundred meters down the trail. Mattea or recalled at one time an Eastern screech owl mail chased me for several hundred yards one of the highlights of their life. They say, anyway, do owls do stuff like that because they like it? Do they like to play? Firecaf fifty five said sometimes they come into my house. Wonder what that's all about? Firecaf fifty five, So am I what? Chris curious asked, why do barn owls act so weird
around people? Ariel Mbi shared that at their college there was an owl that was famed for swooping down on students in the night and it was truly terrifying. Andy Pepper, Michelle and Emily Tiernaney all had similar queries, with Emily writing longtime Listener, First time calor, why do owls steal hats. Do owls like to go after a hat?
No, actually, I don't think so. I think what they're observing is a territorial behavior or a defensive young. Some owls are very very aggressive, and if you get near their young or get near their nests, like great horned owls and uralaloals are notorious for this that if you get near their nest to the young, they attacking, and so oftentimes they're coming for your head or your eyes
and they hit you in the head. And so very often people working on owls or word helmets or goggles or big hats to prevent them from getting wound on the head.
Okay, I found some recent YouTube footage of a person jogging on a trail in a redwood forest, and their account is called run from Owls. Let's take a listen to a video titled owl attack Beautiful Trail Today. That is good, you got my hat. You're serious. So that owl thinks you're a big, weird ape creature, which to be fair, we are, and it wants you to leave its fuzzy babies alone. So yes, they are very serious.
So that's what they're really going after. They're not really going after your hat. They're going after you, then they just happen to get your hat.
Well, a few people and this information was new to me, but Pennyloader, Gomez and James Moorehead wanted to know.
Well.
Liz Tim asked, did the owl do it? If you know?
You know?
Pennyloader wanted to know what you think about the owl defense. In a homicide investigation called the staircase.
Have you heard of this? I have not.
I guess there was a famous homicide case where someone was implicated in the death of his wife, but then they found what could be talon marks on her head and she may have been attacked by an owl. But it was some very big crime story about whether or not this man who was up on a homicide trial for his wife, if actually an owl had attacked her and she fell down some stairs after she was popped by an owl. So that was news to me too.
It's interesting that that does happen you're in if you're in their territory, that they could say, hey, get out here, I got babies around here.
Yeah. That One of my colleagues from Finland who works on eur ASLs Perte, he had a video of him going up to a nest box and he was going to ban the babies. He's on the ladder and this y'all came up and grabbed him right on the butt and was trying to pull him off of the ladder. So he starts saying he's rubbing his butt because you know, they hurt and they gets you. So, yeah, it's not implausible that an al could have hit somebody like that and cause them to leaves rebellons and fall down there.
But you know, I just don't know the details of why the owl would be inside a house.
I think they think it happened right outside and then maybe she was bleeding started ascending the stairs up to her bedroom and then collapsed or something. Okay, I brushed up on this because many of you, Penny Loader Gomez, Lizz Tim James Moorehead asked about this and the hypothesis in the death of Kathleen Peterson was put forward by her neighbor Larry Pollard, who had seen owls a lot
in the area. So babies typically hatch in late winter and early spring, but at the time of Kathleen's death in December two thousand and one, a pair of birds may already have been guarding a nesting site, so forensic teams did find a microscopic feather in her hair, as well as a small splinter of wood, and some autopsy reports show several gashes on her scalp in the shape of three with one below it, which ornithologists say does fit the pattern of talons on an owl. Now it's
a longer story. The victim's husband had also been implicated in a family friend's death who fell down a staircase years before, and he did serve some time for his wife's death, which was thought to be a homicide, but
he's currently free. And if you've heard of the documentary The Staircase, if that's your thing, it covers this whole tragedy, but you're not going to hear a lot about owls in it because the forensic evidence that could have showed an owl's involvement was discovered too late to be included in the trial. So the theory, though, is covered extensively in Titty Smith's twenty twenty three book called Death by Talons.
But Kathleen's death and the possible owl involvement remains a mystery and sadly kind of a punchline.
But owls.
Are you serious? Yes, they are, Sienna red Kite, Faith Stemier, Rob Hoover, Bonnie M. Rutherford all wanted to know well. Faith wrote, yes, owls a lot of exclamation points. Do any owls migrate?
Yes, they do, and some of them show nomadic behaviors. So, for example, there's a phenomenon called eruptions that the snowy owl and hawk ow exhibit when there's a what we think of failure of their primary food in the far North and they move south and invade the United States
and in northern Minnesota at times. I've driven out. When I was on the faculty at the University of Minnesota, we had an eruption one year and my wife and I drove up about twenty five minutes north of the Twin Cities and we saw twenty seven great gray owls and three hawk owls and three hours. Wow, they just come in mass. So that's sort of a form of
migration to movement. Some species, like the spotted owl, we'll show seasonal movements where they will leave a higher country and then go back during the winter and then come back in the springtime. But not all of them do that, so it's not a guaranteed thing. Flammulated owls will migrate tang manzals or boreal owls or will migrate in Finland. One of my greatest experiences was being invited by some Finnish scientists to trap tango manzals in north of the
Arctic Circle. And we set up a triangle of nets, put a fake owl in the middle and turned on a tape recorder and sat back and we're playing this call and the northern lights are right on top of us. And we went over there. We had like eight boreal owls stuck in the nets, and I mean it was fantastic and they were on their migratory route south. So yes, some owls do migrate, Some show uberuptions, some populations proportions and birds migrate, others don't. So a lot of variability there.
What is your passport?
Like?
Do they have to add pages to it?
I usually just get new ones.
Sounds like you and Kat have been so many places?
Yeah, well, you know, owls are always on the top of the list.
Let's go.
Let's go.
A few people. Mary the grapefruit tailor are and Sarah Green wanted to know is a group of owls actually call to parliament or is that just pop culture?
No, that's correct, Is it really? Yes?
Do you ever use that in the field, like, oh, there's a part we drove three hours and we saw parliament of owls.
Well, I never have, and I don't know anybody else's it has, because we usually don't see a big group of owls like that. But you probably could call it a parliament of owls when you're looking at six or seven great gray or great girls and a hawk owl and the snowy owl on the same field, you know, so that might be a parliament of owls, although I never thought of it that way, but that is true, that's the correct term.
And I know you want to know who decides these things, And evidently it's been traced to the Book of Saint Alban's written by a lady who was really good at hawking and hunting, and her name was Dame Juliana Berners. She was also a nun, and the year was fourteen
eighty six. Fourteen eighty six. Let's just do it. Let's read from the Book of Saint Alban's en list a couple of groups of animals, an embarrassment of pandas a passel of possums, a conspiracy of lemurs, the well known murder of crows, a committee of mangoou is, a thunder of hippopotami, a romp of otters, and so many others. What a romp it is? And as we mentioned in the Lutronology episode about otters, nature writer Nicholas Lund has gone on record and reported that, no, these terms are
not widely used scientifically, but I say use them. Er loosom folks, parliament of owls it is, and Dame Berner's is a legend to have made an eight hundred year impression on the vernacular. Speaking of remembrances, many of you needed to know about owl brains and intelligence and wisdom.
M D.
Carvallo, Maggie Hibbitts, Lauren Murphy has Hydro, Ariel Vance and Sarah Cheney to Americ count and ho Ruby Gordon, Julia loves fun Facts, Ashley Kay, Elizabeth Wester's friend Brandy Ray Bae Bass Siena Hope, Kiton Rossau, and first time question asker is Jade Green, owl lover, Molly Logston, Jenny Yu and Kai who asked some friends say they are really stupid? What's the lowdown now? That we've talked about their eyes, what else is in their skull striving to thrive? Ask?
Do owls remember and recognize human faces? There are a lot of people wanted to know, in Sarah Cheney's words, are they really smart? Is that flim flam or true? Jennifer Grogan said, I've heard that owls actually aren't that smart as birds go, in part because their eyeballs fill up too much of their skull to be much room for brains. And Kathleen Sack said, in mythology, owls are supposed to represent wisdom, but I've heard rumors from people
that rescue owls that they are profoundly dumb. What are they working with up top?
I think it's best to say that owls are no smarter or no dumber than any other bird.
Okay, good diplomatic concepts.
They're just birds and they are predators, so they are so focused on the things that they look at. I think that is one of these other illusions that when people see that staring, in the lack of movement and the big eyes, you think they're really contemplating something deep. Yeah, but they're just saying to themselves, can I kill you? Can I eat you, that's are you? Are you? Are you small enough that I can actually handle you? I
think that's what they're thinking. But they're really not any no smarter number than any other bird.
Well on the brains of a lot of our listeners, Vin Haley, Bait, Nicole Campbell, Lawn Cooper, Little Boots, Caliguila val Be listening and a wolf, Shannon Cody, Mouse, Paxton, Lauren Kent, Ellie Brown, and Hannah Ridel all asked and a wolf asked why do they have such awkward legs? A mouse asked why are their legs like that? And Nicole asked, why are their long ass legs hidden? I think it went around the internet that like an owl doesn't have short, squatty legs, if you were to stand
the owl up, they got big, long ones. What's going on?
Well, I think what's happening is is that they don't have particularly long legs, okay, but they appear even much shorter because they're covered in feathers. Many people think that that is an adapt tape to avoid being bitten. So when they grab prey, one of the first things they do is reach down and crush the back of the skull or break the neck of the prey so it doesn't bite them. And I've caught owls and seen many owls sitting on the purchase where there's cuts on their feet,
so that you know that they're getting injured. So some people think that those feathers that actually make their legs appear shorter is really an adaptation to avoid being bitten. Now, in some cases, like the snowy owl, that almost certainly serves as a adaptation to cold as well, because they have these cold areas that they live in.
KaiA Messenger said, owls are my favorite animal. I've always wondered why do they do that little dance where they look like they're at a disco, and why are they so dark cute doing it? Do they do a little like hoppy hoppy hoppy kind of a thing.
It's hard to know exactly what she's talking about, but I can think of a couple of things. One is they do some threat displays in which they've raised a wing up, or they go like this where they bring both wings up, and that might be something like that. Other times they do shake their feathers and move their things so it kind of looks like they're bebopping all round.
And if you're thinking of an owl head bobbing and weaving, or the fact that an owl can keep its head steady kind of like a gimbal while its bod moves all around, this is called motion parallax and it has to do with that ocular anatomy. A Hey, the weird sausage eyes in tubes that we covered in part one. So if you can't move your fixed eyes around, you
got to move your head. And people just they assume you're grooving, so let them now, speaking of tubes and pipes, patron Janettasaur mentioned that growing up in Saskatchewan, we had burrowing owls in our pasture, so cute, so tiny, and Atleasta Young wondered about little owls and side note, the tiniest is the elf owl, which is native to the American Southwest and Mexico, which lives in little woodpecker holes in big cacti, and it has white eyebrows just like
Julia fox and it's very adorable. But back to the burrows, Danny the Dino said, one time my friend and I found a burrowing owl sitting on the ground totally steal three feet from a highway Danielle and Napolitano, Jennifer za Hernak and a wolf all had burrowing owl questions, and Heathcliff asked, what is the best owl and why is it the burrowing owl? What about the ones that we won't see, maybe roosting up high? Why do some of
them burrow? Anna Beatrice mares Pasedro wanted to know what's up with those owls who live in burrows in the ground. Do they nest in trees as well? Their university campus in Brazil has a lot of them. I mean, I've seen sometimes when they're re released in the wild and they just put them on the ground and then they hop in a hole and just one after another. It's like a clown car in reverse. But with owls, why are some of them in the ground?
Well, really, there's only one species that nest in the ground, but it has a very wide distribution. That's the burrowing owl. So they're found from Canada all the way to Argentina and they nest in gopher holes and prairie dog holes. They can dig their own holes, so they're the only one that actually does nest in the ground, and you can encourage them to nest in areas that are grasslands. They're grassland species. They don't nest in trees that you
can actually build burrows for them. You can dig holes and put little tubes in there, like the PBC pipes, and they'll go in there and use these things. I've seen them use irrigation pipes, and yeah, burrowing owls are just cool little critters and so cute. I've seen them in Brazil, Argentina versus every South American country I've been and I've seen burrowing owls.
Do they need to have a hole and then a pipe to get to the hole, like a bagpipe kind of where you've got a tunnel and then a hole on the ground, or do they just dig? Are they just like into the tunnel itself.
Well, you know when they use other species tunnels, they all often go down there and create you know, a cavity within there. And they can use these things extensively. And they don't have feathers on their legs. And because they're mainly insects eaters all they do. They will lead some small mammals. They run down these things just like they're running on a little race, you know, down down the holes, and they can almost any kind of a hole.
They can use as an access point to get down into these holes and enlarge them at the end.
I've never seen one, but I really would love to. And you know you mentioned that they go all the way from Canada down to Argentina. Rowland wanted to know can you tell us anything about owls and folklore and mythology. I think they were considered a death omen in Welsh folklore, but they'd love to know how different cultures view them and Joyful Spitfire Bennett Vanderback, Genna Congden, Klure, Ted Vissia and adds the Erminologist. So many people wanted to know about culture and owls.
You know, I anticipated this question, and so from my own experience, I know that's true because my wife and I travel a lot. You go to Africa and people are very adverse to owls. It's a funny way I discovered this initially in that I always try to buy a little owl carving somewhere that's local, and I just can't find them in Africa. You know, may in South
Africa can, but you Ganda, Ghana, it's not going to happen. Well, I mean you might be able to find him, but it's difficult, and so I did quite a bit of reading, and I realized that the literature and the examples are so extensive that it's almost mind boggling. But the way I think we can handle this is to look at some examples. In a cave in southern France, Chave Cave, a famous cave where there these early cave drawings of homin ens of early people that date back to about
thirty thousand years. There is an owl painted on the wall. And the interesting thing about that owl is that its head shows the your rotation. How does it do that because they just basically you can see the stripes going down the back of the owl and the head is
turned around and facing the eyes or facing you. And so they recognized that this was unique even back then, and again because of that, I think that head twisting is one of the reasons why they some people might have think of them as sinister, because you know, the poulter Geist a little kids, you know, heads swimming around, and that's like the owl, you know, reversing it.
And no, I know, my horror babies, it didn't happen in Poltergeist that I know of. But Rocky is referring to the poltergeist kind of demon entity in the Exorcism that swibbled Linda Blair's young tender head around like a lazy Susan. But of course it is inherently eerie for any kind of animal to do this, like the visual of a turntable cabasa. And we've seen what cinophiles called the exorcist head trope in everything from Shrek to Beetle Juice. It's in the Lego movie, it's in Winnie the Pooh.
But you can also witness this surreal horror in sloths, which can rotate. There's around two hundred and seventy degrees and little cuties called tarsiars which look like a labooboo with a broken neck. Oh, and of course the owls.
And in early our aboriginal cave drawings in Australia, owls have been a part of mythology of humans for a long time. And then you go into the early literature of civilizations and Jewish mythology, for example, that the owl is so shaded with Lenith, the presumed wife of Adam, and the owl is often associated with her as a force of darkness or evil or screech owl nighttime, and other religions like Hindus have a more positive view of owls because often you'll see various gods writing owls as
their banaha, their transport animal. And then you look at in European cultures they mentioned Welsh culture that you see through time that perceptions of owls has changed. At times they're viewed as bad and these change to where they view them positively. And I think it all has to do with the fact that here's a creature that spends its time at night moving around, makes all kinds of
weird noises. You know, if you listen to some of them, they're just totally bizarre, uh sounding little guys like that little long whiskered owlt. The philo plumes are these special feathers they have around their beaks so that they can feel things that are close because there's far sighted owls and they can't see things very close to them, so they actually feel the prey with their little feathers on
their face. And they have a sound that something like this, and when they're making that sound, you know, you're going, what is this weird thing? And of course the barn owls are famous and when people who probably in early human history were living in trees or hiding out in caves, or I mean spending the night in trees because if they are on the ground that got eight or they built a campfire to ward off critters. You can see why this attachment to something sinister or evil might happen.
Many many cultures feel that if you hear an owl, somebody's going to die or something's bad's going to happen. And when you think about it, when somebody dies at night, likely the only thing that you're going to hear in terms of an animal sound is some mammals screeching or an owl, because if a person dies in the daytime, there's all kinds of birds singing, and so there's not a particular focus. This is all speculation on my part, of course, but this is what I'm trying to distill.
This amazing literature. If you look at books on owls, there's almost always a culture chapter about all these different specific examples. So it's pretty amazing how different these things are.
One example that hit home to me was, since I have done a lot of work in New Mexico on owls, on the Mexican spotted owl, I one time asked permission from the Mascalero Apaches if I could catch owls on their land, and they looked at me like, you know, they just were silent, and I went, yeah, something going on, and they said, you can come on the land to do your wildlife work. Do not tell us what you found out. We don't want to know. We don't want
to know there's owls there. We don't want to know anything. And so I did. When I saw him after I left, I was quite successful, and they said how is your trip? And I said very nice. I said, lots of deer, lots of bears, elk. I didn't mention now out of respect for them, because you know they But on the other just a couple of hundred miles away is the Zuni Pueblo, and the Zunis view owls as a source
of wisdom and their good omens. And of course the Zuni are famous for their owl fetish carvings, so they make fetishes of all sorts of animals, and each of the animals conveys a different sense of being to the Zuni, and the owls that they carve are just absolutely spectacular. So my study area was right almost adjacent to the Zuni Reservation and Zuni Peblo, and I'd always go by there and visit them, and made friends with one individual in particular.
Also, I feel like, excuse me, owl fetish, while there are persnas that are technically like featheries. This is not the episode on sexual or creative expression. We don't think shame anyway. But the original notion of a fetish means a religious or spiritual idol or object like those carved so beautifully by the Zunis. And it wasn't until the eighteen hundreds that fetish was also known as like a fascination with an object or a person as an object. Again,
that's a different episode. But while we're getting entomological, Yes, strigoformes and strigopormology do share a root with strega, which is Italian for which, and it stems from the word for female evil spirit or nocturnal creepiness, which came from stricts for owl. And here we are, so yeah, one word can mean a lot of things. One bird can
also mean a lot of things. So Patron Haley Kay, who asked how did owls become both a symbol of knowledge and a harbinger of doom when they're just little goofy guys, and also Patron's Talia dunyak Lori b Kiely Schavez barn owl tattooed JC asked about this, they wrote in to say that they are yelling at the top of their lungs with enthusiasm about owl episodes, So I
hope that gives you some insight into that. Kelly Shaver also wrote in saying I've been told never to post pictures of owls online without a content warning because of their place in some Native American cultures. And on that note, there's a scene in the wonderful series Reservation Dogs where the main characters are visiting their weird uncle Brownie, who has some fake animals in the front yard and.
I'm goo, ah fuck, hell no, not an owl. Oh my god, No, that's not a good sign.
Yeah, I'm gonna have a hard effect.
And in this scene, the owl's eyes are pixelated out, which is both cautionary it's also hilarious. So great show. Highly recommend Preservation Dogs.
And so this is a long roundabout answer that there's been a long and complicated history with owls, and it's changes from time to time, but it can be good or evil. And the last example I would use of that from my own culture, Hispanic culture of New Mexico, is if your audience are interested in Hispanic literature, there's a wonderful book written by Rudolpho Anaya called bless Me Ultima. There was even a movie made by it.
I knew there would be something between us.
Comes the controversial book that was banned forbidden.
And in that they're the Ultima as a kuranderta and her symbol was the owl. But the owl can also in Hispanic culture be something that is a bad omen So it just depends on how the owl with the context of the owl within the situation and who's wielding it and so forth. And so it's a complicated situation
and something that's really interesting to read about. And if you get a chance to read some owl books and you'll see you'll find great stories and really nice analyzes of different examples from all over the world and through time.
So in a moment we'll continue your questions, which cover everything from millennial fashion to the species and political wars of modern day owls. But first let's donate to a of the ologists choosing and for part one, Rocky chose International Owl Center, but for this part too, he chose North Coast Environmental Center, which was founded in nineteen seventy one.
They've been proudly providing quality environmental journalism for decades through their monthly publication of Econews and their weekly econews Report radio show. And they have been an original litigant in lawsuits to save two keystone species. They've allied with indigenous tribes to stop construction and the desecration of sacred indigenous
high country. They've pioneered an international event, Coastal Cleanup Day, and a huge list of other achievements, and you can find out more at your nc dot org, which will link in the show notes. And that donation was made
possible by sponsors of the show. Okay, let's get into a topic that is paramount in the global discussion of owls and you know, anthropologically, I don't know if you know this, but the Joyful Spitfire and ad zerreminologists mentioned that owl pendants were very popular among millennial women in the era of eleven to twenty fifteen. It was a fashion fad and people are afraid that it will come back to haunt us because if you look at bigtures of girls right after the twenty tens Wow, there are
a lot of owl pendants. Everyone was wearing them. So I'm gonna have to go back and look from an anthropological lens why there were owl pendants everywhere. Let me read you the opening graph of an April twenty twenty five article on the website Mama Mia ominously titled Millennials, the latest relic of your twenty ten wardrobe is back, and it reads there was a moment in the mid ninties when absolutely everyone was wearing an owl necklace. It
was the height of the boho trend. Celebrities were teeming empire line dresses with low rise jeans, and the accessory of choice was a big metal bird around your neck with beady black eyes and a tail that fluttered when you moved. And honestly, we've been through so much in twenty twenty five, I don't know if I can handle the resurgence of an owl necklace. It hasn't been long enough, it's too fresh. Also, we've already experienced it like a
second COVID infection. The owl necklaces first hatched in the nineteen seventies as part of a respectable tidal wave of boho animal accessories. But in the twenty tens it was too much. I went down too many owl tunnels. But I did find a two thousand and five video of Lady Gaga wearing one as an unknown brunette singing cover songs to an apathetic crowd. And then there was a big hubbub a few years later when one of the Real Housewives started mass producing and selling them. There were
knockoffs of knockoffs of knockoffs, there were lawsuits. There was no shortage of forever twenty one owl necklaces that would pair perfectly with jeans and a going out top. And I'm not ready to go there again. Let's just move on. Let's heal from the first round. A couple more listener questions if I can. You did some absolutely exceptional hooting, which I knew that you were going to be good at hooting, and Valerie left.
A message, this is Vowerie. I was camping last night, my hair not one, but three barred owls above my tent, talking away last night with the hoo cooks for you and other sounds.
So Valerie wanted to know how owls are as parents, which we covered in Part one. But on the topic of those barred owls, many of you had questions about barred owl versus spotted owl populations, such as Sarah Rosso Crawl One, Oscar Chertain and Horrible Lisa Gorman, Marika, Melissa, Mark, Siena, Miranda Pana, Matt Thompson, Bonnie and Rutherford, Clayton, Rutger, Donielle and Fiona and also Aaron Ryan from Vancouver said, we.
Have a long intured history of spotted owl management and I think we're down to something like one or two individuals left in the wild, and I'm just wondering how badly have we fucked up and are they ever going to come back?
But I wanted to ask about barred owls and spotted owls and if you could give us your take and your history what's going on with bart owls and spotted owls.
First of all, let me give you your audience the hoots for these two ols, so that if they're ever out anywhere on the in the West Coast States in your camping, like your caller mentioned, they'll be able to recognize the different. So the bard owl sounds like this, who cooks for you, who cooks for you all? Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you all? And the spotted owl is different. It's a series of four notes. Oh, and so these calls are distinguishable between those two species.
The hypothesis is, and of course it can never be proved, but that's sort of them material. With a change the settlement of the Midwestern United States and the exclusion of fire, there's been the development of riparian forests along the streams,
planting of woodlands forests in what otherwise grassland. And the bards, which are native to the eastern United States, has moved westward over the past one hundred or so years into Canada, Northern Canada, Manitoba, British Columbia, and then south through Washington, Oregon, and California. But the barn owl is bigger and more aggressive of and a dominant owl, and so they actually drive the spotted owl out of their territories and sometimes
it will kill them. So over the past thirty years we've seen a well, there's been two declines of spotted owls, one related to the loss of old grill forest habitat and the other do the invasion of the l we stabilized.
I'm saying, we know people in conservation has stabilized this through creation of forest reserves and restrictions on logging of old forests, and then guidance the private landowners to maintain certain characteristics of forests so that the owls that they have will be maintained there.
And we go into more detail on forestry management with doctor Gavin Jones in the fire Ecology episode and with doctor Amy Christensen in her Indigenous fire Ecology episode on what she calls good fire. But this spotted owl species, as we mentioned in part one, is this hugely political issue that was essentially conservationists versus loggers, like tree huggers
versus capitalists, animal people versus industry. It came down to this really bifurcated political debate, and the spotted owl became this canary and a coal mine kind of species that helped curb an unsustainable timber industry to preserve a lot of these forests and a lot of the ecology. So that's the good news at.
Least that's sort of been stabilized. But now that this barred owl is invading the range of the spotted owl and displacing them and killing them, and they incurred it much higher densities. It's almost inevitable that they're going to
cause them to go extinct. And the only way that we have determined, and I say we this is scientists in general have determined that this is going to be stopped is to remove the barred owls, and that has caused a great deal of backlash from animal welfare groups because, let's face it, I mean, most people in the United States love owls, including all the people that are a scientists and conservationists that are in favor of removing bardele.
Nobody wants to kill a barn owl, but if you are going to maintain spotted owls, you're going to have to remove bard howls. And it's much more than just the bard owl. This large owl has four times the density that spotted owls do, so they're eating a lot more small mammal prey and their diet is very different from the spotted owls. You can consider the spotted owl as specialist in that their primary prayer flying squirrels and wood rats, and they take around red tree bowls and
some mice and the like. But those two pray make up eighty percent of their diet, whereas the bard al they eat everything. They eat all those plus they eat salamanders. They'll even take fish and insects and birds and you name it. They eat just about everything. And in fact, we think that they're eating so many things and because there's high density, that they're going to have serious negative
effects on many other species as well. An unpublished study that was just recently completed has shown that there's at least thirty species that conservations consider species of special conservation concern that are being eaten by bard owls. Oh that's a lot. And we already have direct evidence of extinction of screech owls on an Island and Huget Sound. Around my house, I have not heard a screech owl or a pigmy owl for ten years, and I've got three pairs of barn owls. So it goes on and on
that there's this cascade effect that this has caused. And we've shown through research again we in the general sense, we've shown through research that it is easy to remove barn owls from certain places, more difficult to other places, but it can be done and it's cost effective to do it as well. Yet, because they are owls, and because killing is involved, there's been a backlash. It's almost analogous to what we see with politics in today's world.
Its euphemistic form is the bullshit asymmetry principle, which means that the amount of effort it takes to countervail misleading or lies is much greater than telling the lie or putting out the misleading information. And so we've had that with with the Bardel in which certain groups have continue to say the same thing that it's impossible to do this. It is, you know, a massive slaughter, and it will be a large number of ls that'll be better be taken.
But once you get the situation under a reasonable control, it's a sort of a maintenance situation that will occur.
And at twenty twenty four New York Times article bearing the headline they shoot owls in California, Don't They explains that northern spotted owl populations have declined by up to eighty percent over the past two decades. It reads, in the wilds of British Columbia, the northern spotted owl has vanished.
Only one a female remains. If the trend continues, it says, the northern spotted owl could become the first owl subspecies in the United States to go extinct, and it goes on to describe that in response to conservationist plans to cull the barred owl while rebuilding more spotted owl habitat, seventy five animal organizations signed a letter urging the federal agency to drop the plan to cull the bard owls.
Now Rocky, interviewed in the New York Times article, said, it's apparent to me that the seventy five authors of that letter either did not understand the plan or they didn't read it carefully. If people complain about the cost and feasibility of fifteen thousand birds removed per year, the price tag for translocation would probably send them into cardiac arrest. And Rocky continued to say, besides being two time consuming, where would you relocate the owls to no one wants them.
You can let nature take its course, he added, but that course would be extinction for the spotted owl.
Now.
One of Rocky's colleagues, Eric Forceman, was quoted as saying, is there some point at which we simply admit that we have screwed things up so badly that there's no going back to the good old days. Eric said, I'm torn apart by this dilemma, and I find it difficult to get mad at anyone on either side of the argument.
And Rocky wrote to me and noted that this article really seemed to have an agenda, it was biased against the science of conservation, and The New York Times also did not include his counterpoint, which is is conservation not a never ending process? And in twenty nineteen, Rocky addressed a Raptor convention on the topic of this dilemma, and his address was titled when a conservation conflict comes full circle. The spotted owl conflict is a wicked problem, which will
link in our website. It's a tough topic and it's a huge problem to try to undo what humans have done to the planet for the last several hundred years.
But yet the person keeps saying that it's going to cost a billion dollars when that's not true at all. It's a lie. But you cannot fight this continual amount of information, So the public in general, I think has
been misled. The LA Times, for example, came out with an editorial against this control, whereas most mainstream conservation groups like American Bird Conservancy, many of the Autumn groups and Center for Biological Diversity are in favor of that control because not just the effect on the bard owt but the effect that all the other owls, plus all these other species that are being killed by the bard owl.
So it's really, you know, as I published a paper one time, it's a wickud problem this and the fire issue that Gavin Jones talked to you about before with the owls. So that is it in a nutshell. It's just sort of a long story, but it is clear what we think the answer is. It's a matter of
whether people are willing to accept this. But the consequence of not excipting it is that you have to be willing to lose all your many of your small owls, many of the other endangered species, and the spotted owl.
So what do we do?
And to me, I think the choice is clear because you have the bard owl is very widespread all over eastern North America and it's an invader in a sense here. Whether that's naturalists they try to claim we're unnatural owing to the effects of humans, to me, that's the material. It is a choice that we're going to make, and the thing of it is that we make these choices
as humans all the time. We can rodents and rats and things that we don't like, species that affect crops, and people say, while you're playing god, well now we're playing human. Really, you know, we're looking after our own self interest, and if our self interest is in maintaining biodiversity and the species that we've come to know and love, then this choice is clear to me.
I was thinking about that today because I have an ant bait in my shower right now and telling my husband, I was like, I'm going to go take a shower with four thousand of my closest friends, and you know, there are an invasive species, this particular kind of ant down here displacing harvesters, and I don't have an issue with putting an ant bait down. And a lot of people probably have rodent bait in their backyard without even
thinking about it. And it's interesting that when the species becomes very charismatic, then that's when people start to speak up. But you know, life for life and how many downstream
effects aren't considered in that management. But I mean, so many people who know wildlife scientists know that they're conservationists and that they're maintaining balance to counter effect what humans have imbalanced is part of wildlife conservation that you have to accept what humans have done and try to counteract it. You mentioned also rodenticides, and last listener question in general is sort of like what can we do to help owls?
A lot of people wanted to know me, like Emily Knudsom, Aaron Farley, It's Hutchins, Cali Tiger, Udy Stratford, Abbott Iris wanted to know about rat poisons and Emily says, big up vote for discussing rat poisons. What can we do to help owls in general? And can we start with not putting out rat poisons?
Absolutely? So the issue of rat poison is a big one, and rat poison has been used for a long time around people's houses and they've used it and agriculture and rodent poision not just rat poison but rodent poison because
of damage to crops. And one of the things about that is that these small mammals that are the target organisms, they eat that and they accumulate it in them and then they die and then other species eat them and then they get the rat poison, and so there's a secondary poisoning effect, and now that we have marijuana growing virtually everywhere in California that it is a huge, huge
problem for wildlife. Studies have been done, for example, as a result of removing these bardels, scientists have actually looked at the secondary poisoning and the bardales that are collected or removed, shot and removed from these spotted out territories and they show something like over eighty percent secondary poisoning. So it's getting into everything. I mean, all these raptors that are picking them, anything that's going to eat, a
carry on is going to pick them up. And I've seen pictures of bears with their faces covered with these really toxic anticoagulant poisons that the bears have rated some pot farmers illegal camp and gotten this stuff all over their face. And they're going to die. I mean, it's allly a matter of time before they're going to die. So it's a very serious problem. And what I would
recommend is people do not use rat poison. They either trap the rats or make every effort to try to exclude the rats from where they are, eliminate their food that they're coming around to try to get close up your house as best you can and so forth. So just avoid rat poison. That's the big thing, because it's a serious problem.
I was like, why weed farms, and I looked into it, and yeah, they like the seeds and the stems and the seed links. But no, I know what you're thinking, because I was thinking it too. And researchers say that the rats are not binge watching Vivis and Buttthead on YouTube or microwaving a bunch of tiquitos. They're not getting stoned. You got to have heat on that. THHC experts say, But yes, if they are eating your crops or your drugs, don't poison them for the owl's sake.
Other things that you can do is, of course, nest boxes. Owls will use the nest boxes. Try to be helpful in terms of the way you have your if you're lucky enough to have a yard and you have ornamental plants, grow plants that have food sources so that you know, squirrels or other things that'll eat those fruits, and then that'll attract other birds plus raptors and owls. So you know, try to do what you can to make your little part of nature to help owls.
What about can you make friends with an owl. If I see an owl and it's hooting, say, my great horned friends, If I say to it, do they say, who are you? Get out of here? Or do they say, what's that? Buddy? Can you hoo back at it?
Now?
Yeah? You can. I don't encourage that. The main thing is that the owls. You have to remember why the owls are hooting. They're hooting to make contact with their mate. They're hooting to defend their territory. Oftentimes, if they're defending the territory and they're on the nest and you hoot to them and you agitate that male that's defending the territory, you very well might call the female off the nest to join the male and the defense of the territory.
And then the young are exposed to predation in the nest or to the weather, and so it's important that you really don't do that. I mean, birders are notoriously bad for wanting to do this, and I mean I understand it. Everybody wants to see owls, but you have to be very very judicious about calling owls and try to do it not in the primary part of the nesting season, but in the in the non nesting season, or or right at the edges, when you know, the younger out of the nest and are able to take
care of themselves. And and in fact, when I travel places and I've seen an owl for a particular species, I don't call it, even though I'd really love to see it, I just don't do it, okay, because I know that other birders are around there trying to see those those owls as well, and and I just figure it's my tiny contribution to, you know, reducing harassment of these these birds.
Oh that's good to know. So when I hear and see my local owls, I can maybe stand or my breath. Hello, I like you, and that's plenty.
Yeah, Oh they could probably hear that. I trust me. They have incredible hearings. It's a hundred times better than us, you know. And as an example in southern California, my sister Angela lives in a little town called a Highlands out on the base of the sam Bordaninos, and we were sitting in her She lives on the edge of this arroyo, and I saw a barn aw at dusk Land about one hundred and fifty two hundred meters away from it, which is a fair distance. And she said, oh,
did you see that owl? I said yeah. I said, you want to see it closer? And she said, oh, come on, you can't bring it closer, and I want to watch this, and I went, I made that sound of a mouse, and that thing came right to my head. And that's the old hat trick, right. It came right over the top of my head, my duck, and it landed right behind me. And then that bird heard me from one hundred and fifty two hundred yards away, So even that little tiny they may hear you, so.
Oh my gosh, I'll keep my mouth shut. And Rocky later sent me a sweet, wonderful note apologizing for being harsh about it, which he was not in any way. But he also said that the American Birding Association has a code of conduct, which we'll link in our site, about when it is okay to vocalize toward an owl.
And so now, when I hear owls hooting, especially those lovely nights when a pair is hooting at each other to reinforce their bond, which is like exactly what's happening when you're talking to someone and you can't stop texting back and forth. I will stay out of it. That's not my place. So that's so good to know. Thank you Rocky for helping me not freak out the people I love who are sometimes owls. I always ask your least favorite and your favorite thing about what you do.
What is the hardest part about studying owls? Is it the conservation part? Is it staying up too late?
Well, I mean for me, it has really been the conservation conflict aspect of it, because almost invariably most spotted owl experts get involved to a degree with conservation conflicts
or the owl conflict. But I've taken it to a different level in the sense that I got really interested in this mainly because I have a very good colleague and friend from the University of Aberdeen, Stephen Redpath, who came out to visit me as a post doc, and I took him around to our study area and we got to be really good friends, and we started collaborating on conservation conflicts, thinking about the general theory of it and why people make the decisions they do, and how
do you resolve conflicts and what are the key issues involved here? When I get involved in I just see how intractable it is and it's very discouraging, but it's almost like a microcosm of our politics today. Or do you see this constant barrage of misinformation in outright lies? And again you know that bullshitt asymmetry principle comes in there, and it's very difficult to deal with that. You can defeat them in the scientific arena, but it doesn't make
any difference if they're winning in the public arena. They're experts at this, they're experts at at social media, they're experts at communicating with people and reaching politicians, and scientists aren't trained to do that. And I think that's the greatest frustration that there is to me.
So yes, when people use scientific sounding language to mislead the public about what the experts are actually saying, that really gets his goat understandably. Clearly, Rocky and his owl expert colleagues have dedicated their lives to the survival of threatened species. What about your favorite part about studying owls or a favorite owl or a moment in your owl history that sticks out for you.
Well, my favorite owl, of course is the spotted owl, because of you know, I've gotten to know it so well. But the owl I wanted to see most in the world was a long whiskered owl. It's a little, tiny owl set probably the second smallest owl in the world. Is a weird little guy and lives an elfin forests in the andes of Peru. They're about the size of your hand you put up your hand, a little teeny things.
But really the most satisfying thing to me, and what has made this probably the most wonderful part of the journey, is the students that I've worked with, you know, seeing how they have thought of a problem, solved it, gone out. They've done the hard work, created something wonderful and gone on and had a fantastic career. And I just, I just I felt that that was the penultimate reward for all of the work on the owls.
Oh, that's so sweet to hear. And people who talk about you behind your back, People say the sweetest things about you, and that you're just such an icon and a mentor. People gush about you behind your back. So whether or not you're good at taking compliments, just know that you're very beloved in the bird community and especially the owl community. But Rocky, this is even better than I imagined I have been begging you to come on
this show for weeks and weeks and weeks. It was even better than imagined.
Yeah, well the best. I appreciate that. I was looking forward to it myself.
Thank you for making my dream come true and letting me talk to you about owls for a couple hours.
That's fine, I can. I can talk about all owls all the time here.
All day, and I guess all night too. So once again, ask visionary people some blurry questions. And thank you so much again to RJ. Rocky Gutierres for being on not just this week, but last week as well. We have links in the show notes to find out more about Rocky, and of course we post more research on our website at aliward dot com, slash ologies, slash striggo formology, and after part one aired, Rocky mentioned his wonderful wife in a note writing to me. I also found out KT
is almost as shy as me. She was embarrassed that I praised her talent, but I told her she should never be embarrassed because I am not shy about expressing my love for her, So she settled down after that. I never get tired of praising her talents of which there are many. Oh, Rocky kt, how lucky we are to have you two out here on our little planet helping out the owls too. So we are at Ologies
on Instagram and Blue Sky. I'm at Aliward on both smologies are shorter kid friendly episodes available wherever you find podcasts, just search SMO l Ogies. Ologies merch has totes and hats and shirts. Thank you to patrons at patri on dot com slash Ologies for supporting the show. They also get first stims on tickets for live shows, which is another perk for a dollar a month. Thank you to Aaron Talbert, who admin Theology's podcast Facebook group. Aveline Malik
makes our professional transcripts. Kelly R. Dwyer does a website once again. Nocturnal and Diurnal scheduling producer is well Dilworth. Our eagle eyed managing director is Susan Hale, and the pair of editors sharing the branch is Jake Chafe and lead editor Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio. Nick Thorburn hooted out the theme music and if you stick around until the very end, you know I may tell you a secret.
And this week it's that Yes, according to listeners, I can ruin my life by tugging my dongle out of a port before ejecting the SD cart. So thank you for scaring me straight. I shall never again. Also another secret, absolutely bonkers, is that I was working on this episode on a plane from Atlanta to Hartford, Connecticut last night to go give a talk at Smith College, which I'm
about to do in an hour or two. And the pilot casually said, then, if you look out your window on the lift side of the plane, you'll see And I was sure he was going to name like some bullshit stadium I didn't care about. It was like ten pm. I had more writing to do, and he was like, you'll see the Northern lights. And I took a glance. The horizon was fushut and red and green, and my face was pressed to the window and I tapped the dude next to me and he said, oh, yeah, I
was stationed in Alaska for years. You should hear him crackle when they move. What I saw the Northern lights at a plane window last night. I was like, well, that's a little treat, isn't it. And for more on the Northern lights and solar storms, you can see the Heliology episode from April twenty twenty four, as well as the Eclipse field trip episode. Anyway, there I am. I'm folded up in an airplane seat. I got mustard on my jacket, just crossing off a bucket list item from
the actual sky, so I'm not mad at that. Also, the solar storm may be visible through November fourteenth, just in case you're inner region that can see it. Okay, good luck, farewell for by Pacaderman College Homeiology, crypto Zoology, Lithology and Sechnology, Meteorology and Wold Federatology, Ethnology, seriology, selenology, and
My hat back h