Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News.
Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to another episode of the All Lots Podcast.
Speaker 2: I'm Tracy Alloway and I'm Joe.
Speaker 3: Why wasn't thal Joe?
Speaker 2: Did you hear the sad news?
Speaker 4: Okay, I guess I know the sad news you are
Speaker 4: talking about. I have to say I was a little
Speaker 4: surprised to get a push.
Speaker 3: Alert that an owl had died. I know, for some
Speaker 3: people it's a really big.
Speaker 2: That is such shade, that is such shade, or I'm
Speaker 2: the slack of the owl. I can't believe you're saying.
Speaker 4: I'm trying to be diplomatic. Some people seem to be
Speaker 4: like really torn up. I was like, I'm a little
Speaker 4: surprised that the death of an owl made it to
Speaker 4: a push alert. But nonetheless, yes, I know where you're
Speaker 4: going with this. Okay.
Speaker 2: So for those people who don't know, maybe they don't
Speaker 2: follow local New York news as much. Maybe they're just
Speaker 2: heartless New Yorkers like Joe. They don't care about the animals.
Speaker 2: Flacco the owl died recently. We're recording this on February
Speaker 2: twenty seventh. He died over the weekend. Apparently he flew
Speaker 2: into a building, although we're still waiting for the toxicology report,
Speaker 2: I think. But the reason everyone was so interested in
Speaker 2: the fate and fortunes of this owl is because he
Speaker 2: was actually a Eurasian eagle owl who had escaped from
Speaker 2: the zoo. Although actually I think vandals basically broke into
Speaker 2: his exhibit and let him out, and he's been flying
Speaker 2: around the city ever since. He was sort of a
Speaker 2: symbol of survivalism in the urban jungle. People didn't expect
Speaker 2: him to be able to make it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and so there were a bunch of spottings right
Speaker 4: in Central Park and elsewhere.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there are photos of him. He would perch on
Speaker 2: air conditioners and sort of peek into people's windows at
Speaker 2: odd times over the day and night.
Speaker 4: Kind of wild that in a city this big, like
Speaker 4: a single bird could just be spotted all over the
Speaker 4: place for the while, and people would notice, like, oh,
Speaker 4: this is a bad bird.
Speaker 3: Like that's pretty cool.
Speaker 2: Well, he stood out right, he's not native. Again, the
Speaker 2: clue is in the name Eurasian eagle owl. But I
Speaker 2: have to ask, how much do you think an owl
Speaker 2: like Flacco is worth?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 4: Wow, huh, that's a good question.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 4: Like how much would it cost, like if I wanted
Speaker 4: to acquire one, Like are you thinking that?
Speaker 2: Well this kind of yeah, this kind of gets into
Speaker 2: the issue, right what would the basis of that valuation
Speaker 2: actually be? So you can imagine there's probably a market
Speaker 2: price that zoos or even black market collectors would pay
Speaker 2: for and Eurasian eagle out. There's probably a replacement value
Speaker 2: for insurance for a viable male that could produce chicks.
Speaker 2: But maybe maybe Flacco has value in other ways. So
Speaker 2: people were clearly happy to see him flying around the city.
Speaker 2: We know that he was eating rats at certain points,
Speaker 2: so maybe he was valuable as someone killing rats and
Speaker 2: other pets. But on the other hand, you know what
Speaker 2: if he ate someone's backyard chicken, then would he have
Speaker 2: negative value? He's destroying public property or private property? What
Speaker 2: if it was a buff Orpington, a really nice show Orpington,
Speaker 2: and now someone has to replace their fancy chicken. I
Speaker 2: have a lot of thoughts on this show. I'm sorry
Speaker 2: to regale you with them at like mine in the morning.
Speaker 3: H No.
Speaker 4: I you know, look, clearly the death of Flacco meant
Speaker 4: more to you than me. But just objectively listening to
Speaker 4: you're like Wow, there's some really interesting questions here that
Speaker 4: I just would never have thought about at all in
Speaker 4: terms of the connection between Yeah, there must be some
Speaker 4: dollar value. There must be there is some economic value
Speaker 4: associated with a bird that people love that is rare,
Speaker 4: that would have been difficult for a zoo to acquire,
Speaker 4: That would be difficult for a zoo to secure. There's
Speaker 4: a cost to is you said the insurance? So interesting
Speaker 4: questions that I had certainly never once thought about up
Speaker 4: until one minute ago in my life.
Speaker 2: You know what, Joe, we don't even have to speculate
Speaker 2: about this.
Speaker 3: Okay, we don't have to do we have the answer.
Speaker 2: Well, it turns out there is actually a whole body
Speaker 2: of economics that deals with exactly this topic. It is
Speaker 2: economic ornithology.
Speaker 4: Can I just say something, Tracy, Yes, I think you're
Speaker 4: more interested in this topic than any other episode we've
Speaker 4: done in about a year.
Speaker 2: This is my revenge for like the Celsius episode, where
Speaker 2: not only do I have to talk about Celsius for
Speaker 2: thirty minutes, but I also have to drink it while
Speaker 2: we're talking. Yeah, okay, fair, I should have brought a
Speaker 2: bird for us to look at while we're here. No, Okay,
Speaker 2: economic ornithology. So the idea here is to actually attach
Speaker 2: an estimated value to birds and their role in the
Speaker 2: ecosystem of eating bugs and rodents and other things that
Speaker 2: might be considered pests, either in New York City or
Speaker 2: in farmland and the agricultural industry. So this is a
Speaker 2: thing that exists, and I think we should talk about it.
Speaker 3: Let's do it.
Speaker 2: Okay. I'm very very happy, Joe lesso. But I am
Speaker 2: happy to say we do, in fact have the perfect guest.
Speaker 2: We're going to be speaking with Robert Francis. He is
Speaker 2: the author of the bird history Substack, and he wrote
Speaker 2: a really great piece about economic ornithology. So Robert, thank
Speaker 2: you so much for coming on.
Speaker 5: All thoughts, thanks for having me.
Speaker 2: Joe clearly is a little incredulous that this is something
Speaker 2: that exists. How did you start writing about economic ornithology?
Speaker 2: How did you discover this topic?
Speaker 1: Sure?
Speaker 5: So I'm working on a book about how the relationship
Speaker 5: between birds and people has changed over the course of
Speaker 5: America's history. And when you're looking at the progressive era,
Speaker 5: so from the eighteen nineties to the nineteen thirties, you
Speaker 5: really can't miss the way that people talk about birds
Speaker 5: in economic terms. They talk about birds in their relation
Speaker 5: to agriculture and as friends to farmers, as playing a
Speaker 5: really important role in protecting crops from agricultural pests. And
Speaker 5: this isn't just farmers talking about it. You read people
Speaker 5: talking about birds like this in the Saturday Evening post
Speaker 5: in Harper's Weekly. You hear sportsmen talking about it. You
Speaker 5: read in school manuals that children are getting problems about
Speaker 5: how to calculate how many destructive bugs each individual bird
Speaker 5: might eat over the course of, you know, several months.
Speaker 5: So it's really something that's you know, throughout society that
Speaker 5: people are thinking about birds in this way. And the
Speaker 5: force behind this is a government bureau called the Bureau
Speaker 5: of Biological Survey that was established in eighteen eighty five
Speaker 5: to study this question to help farmers understand how they
Speaker 5: should feel about birds and what the impact of birds
Speaker 5: are or could be on their crops.
Speaker 3: So, all right, this is already fascinating.
Speaker 4: I didn't know that there was a Bureau of Biological Survey,
Speaker 4: but that is really You mentioned children's problems about okay,
Speaker 4: how many bugs or bird would eat. What are some
Speaker 4: of the other ways when you talk about this language
Speaker 4: of talking of birds and economic language, What do we
Speaker 4: talk about?
Speaker 3: What does it sound like?
Speaker 4: How are they describing these birds?
Speaker 5: Sure, so they're talking about birds as protecting crops from
Speaker 5: destructive bugs. They're talking about hawks and eagles and owls
Speaker 5: protecting crops from from mice and rats and other things
Speaker 5: might eat grain or might destroy, might affect like the
Speaker 5: orchards or things like that. And it's really looking at
Speaker 5: birds at an individual level. So they're thinking about you know,
Speaker 5: their main way that they study that they study birds
Speaker 5: and their impact on crops is by cutting open their
Speaker 5: stomachs and counting how many how many bugs of each
Speaker 5: different species, how many little you know, broken up pieces
Speaker 5: of bugs that they find in their stomachs, and comparing
Speaker 5: that to how many seeds from from wheat that they
Speaker 5: might find, how much you know, little pieces of apples
Speaker 5: that they see in and comparing it and saying, what
Speaker 5: are they doing that's helpful? How many destruct bugs are
Speaker 5: they eating? How many harmful bugs are they eating compared
Speaker 5: to how many helpful things to the farmer are they eating?
Speaker 5: And where's the balance? Where does the balance lie help
Speaker 5: Are they more helpful to the farmers or are they
Speaker 5: more harmful.
Speaker 2: So birds can be good or bad for crops. They
Speaker 2: can eat your strawberries, and I speak from personal experience here,
Speaker 2: but they can also eat the Japanese beetles on your
Speaker 2: rose bushes. And again I'm speaking from personal experience, and
Speaker 2: Japanese beetles are my arch enemy now. But anyway, how
Speaker 2: do you come up with the net calculation for something
Speaker 2: like that? And how precise can you get with that?
Speaker 2: Can you get it all the way down to dollars
Speaker 2: and cents? So you know, this robin is worth like
Speaker 2: eight hundred and fifty three dollars to me in terms
Speaker 2: of crop protection every year.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and you know, the economic ornithologists of this periods
Speaker 5: certainly tried and you look at the figures that they
Speaker 5: put out, and it makes it seem very very precise.
Speaker 5: And so a calculation might be okay, So a mouse
Speaker 5: might eat two cents of grain over the course of
Speaker 5: a year, and a single hawk, based on finding you know,
Speaker 5: how many mice that they find in a dissected hawk's stomach,
Speaker 5: a single hawk might eat a thousand mice over the
Speaker 5: course of a year. So you know, you do that
Speaker 5: arithmetic and you see that this hawk saves a farmer
Speaker 5: twenty dollars worth of grain. Of course, the same hawk
Speaker 5: might also eat six chickens over the course of a year,
Speaker 5: and each chicken might be worth fifty cents to a farmer.
Speaker 5: So you know, it does twenty dollars worth of benefit
Speaker 5: to the farmer and three dollars worth of harm. So
Speaker 5: this hawk, according to these economic ornithologists, they would tell farmers,
Speaker 5: this hawk is worth seventeen dollars to you. So, and
Speaker 5: the reason that they were sharing this information is to
Speaker 5: try to affect farmer's behaviors. They're trying to get far
Speaker 5: or farmers to stop killing these these hawks. So they
Speaker 5: would tell a farmer, you know, you might save yourself
Speaker 5: three dollars by by killing this hawk that occasionally eats
Speaker 5: your chickens, but you're actually costing yourself twenty dollars by,
Speaker 5: you know, in lost grain.
Speaker 3: So is the basically.
Speaker 4: A hawk eating a chicken is a very visible thing.
Speaker 4: The hawkyat my chicken, You don't, I mean, it is
Speaker 4: just sort of like almost the count one on one
Speaker 4: the scene, the underseening a little bit, but it's like
Speaker 4: what they probably the hawk eating the mouse, which would
Speaker 4: is a grain is just not something that would be
Speaker 4: as front of mine.
Speaker 5: For those yep, exactly. And so you know, this bureau
Speaker 5: that was established in eighteen eighty five is looking at,
Speaker 5: you know, all of these birds that have these reputations
Speaker 5: as pests, crows that you will eat your corn, robins
Speaker 5: that will pack at your apples, and that farmers had
Speaker 5: traditionally killed. And they were trying to act as almost
Speaker 5: like judges on behalf of these birds and look at
Speaker 5: all of them and say, okay, for each of these
Speaker 5: birds that farmers complain about, are these birds actually more
Speaker 5: helpful or harmful? And in almost every case they came
Speaker 5: back and said, you know, even these birds that like
Speaker 5: a crow, that people have traditionally thought of as pests,
Speaker 5: they actually do they actually have a net positive impact
Speaker 5: on agriculture by eating harmful bugs, by eating mice, you know,
Speaker 5: and that impact is greater than the harm that they
Speaker 5: caused by you know, opening up the occasional ear of corn.
Speaker 2: So you touched on this earlier, the idea of you know,
Speaker 2: kids in school rooms maybe trying to do these calculations.
Speaker 2: But talk to us a little bit more about how
Speaker 2: wide spread this knowledge was. So if I was a
Speaker 2: farmer in Iowa in the early nineteen hundreds, and I was,
Speaker 2: you know, sat on my front porch watching sparrows eat
Speaker 2: my grain.
Speaker 5: Would I be.
Speaker 2: Sat there thinking like, it's okay. They're also eating like
Speaker 2: some weed seeds and some harmful bugs, so that's all good.
Speaker 2: Like how much was this embedded in the popular consciousness
Speaker 2: at the time.
Speaker 5: You know, at the end of the eighteen hundreds, I
Speaker 5: would say not very much. Again, there was this tradition,
Speaker 5: I mean, there were a lot of states, for example,
Speaker 5: that offered bounties for crows, for sparrows, for birds that
Speaker 5: were perceived as harmful. So states would pay farmers to
Speaker 5: kill crows. That sometimes pay farmers to kill hawks. So
Speaker 5: you know, it was pretty it was pretty well accepted
Speaker 5: that there were some birds that were harmful for crops
Speaker 5: and it was better for everyone if we killed them.
Speaker 5: As this bureau went, you know, over time, pushing out
Speaker 5: information about the positive impact that birds had on agriculture,
Speaker 5: and it became much more accepted and much more popular
Speaker 5: to think of birds as helpful to agriculture. You know,
Speaker 5: you saw the end of these bounty laws. You saw
Speaker 5: these publications that I referenced in the Saturday Evening post
Speaker 5: and in, you know, just like popular magazines talking about
Speaker 5: the importance of birds. You also had publications in some
Speaker 5: thing called the Farmers Bulletin that went out to farmers
Speaker 5: that they could read, you know, to learn about how
Speaker 5: how to improve their their crop yields. And you know,
Speaker 5: alongside articles about you know, best practices with like planting
Speaker 5: and tilling, you had these these articles about building bird
Speaker 5: houses to attract certain kinds of birds.
Speaker 3: Something about economics.
Speaker 4: The phenomenon is economists sometimes arrive at conclusions about things
Speaker 4: that feel intuitively wrong. In fact, often economists love that
Speaker 4: about themselves, like you think this is good for the economy,
Speaker 4: but actually you're really a harmy. You know, this is
Speaker 4: like they sort of and I have to wonder, so
Speaker 4: like I'm re looking at your substack, and there's this
Speaker 4: picture of economic ornithologists and they seem to be wearing
Speaker 4: three piece suits and these like very fancy silk ties
Speaker 4: in the photo, and I wonder if, like the farmers
Speaker 4: out in the middle of the country, you know, they
Speaker 4: have these notions like how this bird's good.
Speaker 2: They're like grumbling about the economists in their white towers.
Speaker 4: And then the economists that there are three peace suits
Speaker 4: are like, well, actually, this bird.
Speaker 3: Is good for you.
Speaker 4: And I'm curious if there's like a sort of you know,
Speaker 4: today people don't like hearing from economists often because economists
Speaker 4: say this is actually good for you, and you thought
Speaker 4: it was bad. Like, look, I know, I don't need
Speaker 4: to listen to you. I know it's good man. I'm
Speaker 4: curious if that sort of culture clash was evident even
Speaker 4: back then, if like these economists from the bureau came
Speaker 4: trying to tell farmers what they should and shouldn't kill totally.
Speaker 5: And you know, I haven't seen instances where there was
Speaker 5: like actually that conflict, but in a lot of cases
Speaker 5: they were fighting an uphill battle. I think there were
Speaker 5: certainly a lot of farmers that adopted some of these practices,
Speaker 5: and you saw like a decrease in the number of
Speaker 5: hawks that were killed. But at the same time, like
Speaker 5: while most birds received federal protection in nineteen eighteen, some
Speaker 5: hawks and some owls didn't receive the same level of
Speaker 5: production until the seventies. Throughout this entire time, there were
Speaker 5: still a lot of farmers that would keep killing the
Speaker 5: birds that they saw eating eating their crops. And you know,
Speaker 5: some of this tension still exists today, Like there's still
Speaker 5: a lot of birds that are considered by farmers and
Speaker 5: by like the Department of Agriculture. They're still considered past.
Speaker 5: This idea that birds can be harmful to crops and
Speaker 5: are sometimes harmful to crops has not completely disappeared.
Speaker 2: So on that note, I know the book you're working
Speaker 2: on is primarily focused on the relationship between birds and
Speaker 2: people in America, but maybe it might be helpful to
Speaker 2: contrast it with the most famous example of people getting
Speaker 2: the economic value of birds wrong, which is what happened
Speaker 2: in China under the four Pess campaign, where people were
Speaker 2: encouraged to go out and kill a bunch of different
Speaker 2: pests sparrows included, and then it backfired horribly and you
Speaker 2: got a bunch more insects I think it was mostly locusts,
Speaker 2: and then a lot fewer crops and then a great
Speaker 2: famine in the late fifties early sixties. But I think
Speaker 2: when people think about the economic or agricultural value of birds,
Speaker 2: that's probably one of the prime examples that springs to mind.
Speaker 5: Sure, and I think we haven't seen something like that
Speaker 5: in the United States in recent years. So I would
Speaker 5: say that as an so much top of mind, But
Speaker 5: you can look at more recent research that's come out
Speaker 5: about the impact of birds on crops, and you know,
Speaker 5: we can maybe talk in a moment about kind of
Speaker 5: some of the methodological limitations of these these progressive era
Speaker 5: economic ornithologists. But more recent research that you know, makes
Speaker 5: use of things like randomized control trials and take some
Speaker 5: more ecological approach has shown pretty convincingly that birds have
Speaker 5: a very positive impact on agriculture. And you know that
Speaker 5: when you have insectivorous birds hanging around your orchard, yields
Speaker 5: for apples and for orchard crops improved. The same thing
Speaker 5: is true for field crops when you have birds that
Speaker 5: eat bugs like you do see improvements in your yields.
Speaker 5: But this is something that you know, these economic ornithologists
Speaker 5: weren't able to show as well with the methods that
Speaker 5: they use back in the twenties and thirties.
Speaker 2: So you mentioned in your piece that economic ornithology sort
Speaker 2: of fell out a favor in I guess it's traditional sense,
Speaker 2: and part of the reason was because of the use
Speaker 2: of pesticides. So if you're spraying all your crops for bugs,
Speaker 2: you don't really need as many birds to eat those bugs,
Speaker 2: and so their usefulness kind of declines. Talk to us
Speaker 2: about that transition, and then again coming back up to
Speaker 2: speed to modern day, like, what evidence do we have
Speaker 2: of the usefulness of birds in modern agriculture? Now?
Speaker 3: Sure? Right?
Speaker 5: So, there were a handful of reasons why economic ornithology
Speaker 5: disappeared in the nineteen thirties and the nineteen forties, And
Speaker 5: as you mentioned, a big one is that with the
Speaker 5: rise of effective and affordable pesticides and insecticides, farmers had
Speaker 5: much more control over the pest in their field. Before
Speaker 5: you had these pesticides, birds were kind of the best
Speaker 5: option that farmers had, and they know they had to
Speaker 5: rely on these these almost natural methods of pest control.
Speaker 5: But that wasn't the only reason that this field kind
Speaker 5: of disappeared. There were also some pretty significant methodological limitations.
Speaker 5: So first of all, it was not much of an
Speaker 5: apply science. They could show how many harmful bugs an
Speaker 5: individual bird might eat, but they didn't have reliable methods
Speaker 5: to show that if you do if you build a
Speaker 5: bird house, you know you'll be able to expect a
Speaker 5: ten percent increase in yields on certain crops, or if
Speaker 5: you plant certain types of shrubs to attract birds that
Speaker 5: you'll have you'll be able to see specific impacts on
Speaker 5: your crop yields. The second limitation is that they weren't
Speaker 5: really taking an ecological approach. They were looking at individual
Speaker 5: birds and how many bugs they might eat, and they
Speaker 5: were comparing kind of two facts that seem that seem intuitive.
Speaker 5: On one hand, you know, in the nineteen twenties there
Speaker 5: were every year bugs destroyed hundreds of millions of dollars
Speaker 5: of crops, and economists estimate that between ten and twenty
Speaker 5: percent of crop yields every year were destroyed by insects.
Speaker 5: On the other hand, you have data on these birds
Speaker 5: that you know, one single bird every day might eat
Speaker 5: twelve hundred cinch bugs, for example, and these are major
Speaker 5: for crops. And so you compare those things and you say, well, intuitively,
Speaker 5: more birds eating more bugs would mean that crop yields
Speaker 5: would improve. There is data now showing that that birds
Speaker 5: do actually keep passed under control. But at the time
Speaker 5: these economists weren't able to show that relationship. They weren't
Speaker 5: able to show that, like baseline level of bugs would
Speaker 5: decrease when you had more more birds. There were other
Speaker 5: there were critics. A lot of them were entomologists studying
Speaker 5: studying bugs that said, like, you know, if a bird
Speaker 5: is hanging around on your farm, you can actually prove
Speaker 5: that the bird is eating bugs on the farm. You know,
Speaker 5: they observe birds, birds flying over to the river to
Speaker 5: eat bugs and coming back, and the ornithologists would would
Speaker 5: you know, shoot this bird and dissected stomach and say, okay,
Speaker 5: it's eating all of these bugs. But they're not actually
Speaker 5: bugs that are preying on crops, so they they weren't
Speaker 5: able to establish that relationship at an end, at the
Speaker 5: individual the level of individual birds and bugs.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, So I have a neighbor who is a
Speaker 2: reasonably famous ornithologist actually, and the way he explained it
Speaker 2: to me was that when pests have population outbreaks, so
Speaker 2: if there's a big infestation of locusts or something, birds
Speaker 2: can't actually respond fast enough to really affect the numbers,
Speaker 2: but during non outbreak years they can, so they decrease
Speaker 2: the baseline as you'd mentioned.
Speaker 5: Yep, that's totally correct. So, and there's been a lot
Speaker 5: of recent research showing that birds do actually keep bug
Speaker 5: populations in check and they keep them at a manageable level,
Speaker 5: so they prevent these these massive outbreaks of bugs that
Speaker 5: are what is really really destructive to farmer's crops.
Speaker 4: Something I'm interested in here is thinking about the timelines
Speaker 4: the late eighteen hundreds. Can you situate a little bit further,
Speaker 4: like how bird or economic ornithology and this idea of well,
Speaker 4: let's let's study this by counting. Let's just look, we're
Speaker 4: gonna get a we're gonna have an eagle, We're gonna
Speaker 4: you know, dissect it. We're gonna count the number of
Speaker 4: mice eight over its lifetimes. Of how based on what
Speaker 4: it's in there, like how it fit into sort of
Speaker 4: broader philosophies of government and management, because you know, there
Speaker 4: were a lot of things also going around that time,
Speaker 4: and obviously there's the rise of like Henry Ford and
Speaker 4: new ideas about managing a factory floor, and so it
Speaker 4: seemed to be, you know, an era of counting things
Speaker 4: and trying to apply scientific methods to things that maybe
Speaker 4: prior to that people just had intuitions for. Can you
Speaker 4: talk a little bit more about the sort of like
Speaker 4: the ideological era in which this field emerge.
Speaker 3: Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 5: So I might mention what kind of came before the
Speaker 5: attitudes that came before economic ornithology, and during that time
Speaker 5: or before before this bureau developed, So, you know, and
Speaker 5: you read about this and attitudes, and as back as
Speaker 5: far back as the eighteen forties eighteen fifties, people had
Speaker 5: this idea that either through divine design or through providence,
Speaker 5: all of nature kind of existed in this balance where
Speaker 5: you know, bugs kept plant populations in check, birds kept
Speaker 5: bug populations in check, other predators kept bird populations in check.
Speaker 5: And when nature was in this like state of batalance,
Speaker 5: you wouldn't have these massive infestations of bugs. You know,
Speaker 5: things would would be stable. But with kind of the
Speaker 5: settlement of the country and and you know, clearing forests
Speaker 5: to make fields, humans had thrown off this balance and
Speaker 5: birds were the only force keeping bug populations in check.
Speaker 5: And so you have this scientific field of economic ornithology
Speaker 5: that develops in the eighteen eighties. It's not contesting these
Speaker 5: these previous ideas. Instead, it's it's using these kind of
Speaker 5: like modern statistical scientific methods to kind of demonstrate that
Speaker 5: they're they're correct.
Speaker 2: So I think there's a tendency when we read about
Speaker 2: economic ornithology to think that, you know, This is something
Speaker 2: that was popular in the late eighteen hundreds early nineteen hundreds.
Speaker 2: It's kind of fallen out of favor for the reasons
Speaker 2: we've discussed, but in some ways you do see a
Speaker 2: revival of the more generalist concept of attaching economic value
Speaker 2: to animals in modern day conservation. And shout out to
Speaker 2: another podcast here, but Radio Lab did a fantastic episode
Speaker 2: on this where they talked about I think it was
Speaker 2: back in like twenty fourteen or something there was a
Speaker 2: hunter that paid three hundred and fifty thousand dollars to
Speaker 2: go to Namibia and shoot a lion, and there was
Speaker 2: a huge uproar about whether or not that should be allowed.
Speaker 2: But one of the arguments for allowing that kind of
Speaker 2: sport of hunting where people can pay to go kill
Speaker 2: animals as well, if you can put an actual monetary
Speaker 2: amount on the life of this particular animal, then it
Speaker 2: gives people incentive to protect it. So there is still
Speaker 2: like an element of that theme run through some modern
Speaker 2: day conservation work. It feels.
Speaker 5: Right, And I think that's a really interesting question, and
Speaker 5: it's it's not an easy one. I think there's a
Speaker 5: lot of debate among conservationists about you know, whether this
Speaker 5: is appropriate, whether this is more helpful than it is harmful.
Speaker 5: I think that there's a lot of different ways of
Speaker 5: trying to assign value to wildlife. I mean, I think
Speaker 5: the way that you mentioned, where there's a specific price
Speaker 5: placed on, you know, the head of an individual animal,
Speaker 5: is one way. And I think it's interesting that that's
Speaker 5: kind of related to almost consumption, Like you put a
Speaker 5: price on its head, and what that lets you do
Speaker 5: is kill it, right, you kind of almost have this
Speaker 5: like ownership over this animal. But there's a lot of
Speaker 5: other ways of kind of establishing value or pricing wildlife
Speaker 5: that the kind of you know, look at it from
Speaker 5: a different different direction. So so one way that ecologists
Speaker 5: assign value to wildlife is through something that they call
Speaker 5: ecosystem services, and that's related to you know, it's kind
Speaker 5: of a similar line of things king as economic ornithology,
Speaker 5: where it's like you look at all of the different
Speaker 5: ways that animals and wildlife contribute value to humans. So
Speaker 5: sometimes it's through agriculture, sometimes it's through tourism and things
Speaker 5: like birdwatching. Like I'm a big birdwatcher and I've spent
Speaker 5: a lot of money in traveling to see birds and
Speaker 5: you know, buying binoculars and things like that. So you know,
Speaker 5: they wildlife in that way contributes to the economy. Another
Speaker 5: way that they've that some have suggested for putting a
Speaker 5: value on wildlife is through something that they call existence value. Like,
Speaker 5: you know, I've never seen a polar bear. I don't
Speaker 5: know if I ever will, but it's worth something to
Speaker 5: me that to know that they exist. And you know,
Speaker 5: so if it's worth fifty dollars say to all of
Speaker 5: us to know that polar bears are out there, and
Speaker 5: to you know, to just like appreciate that, you know,
Speaker 5: polar bears individually are as a species are worth quite
Speaker 5: a bit to us. And I think your example of
Speaker 5: Falco is really interesting. This individual bird, you know, is
Speaker 5: worth was worth quite a bit to the city alive.
Speaker 5: You know, there was a lot of a lot of
Speaker 5: people went out and looked for it. People tryveled from
Speaker 5: outside of the city to come find this famous owl.
Speaker 5: There's a lot written about it, and so it brought
Speaker 5: a lot of value, both kind of economic and you know,
Speaker 5: sentimental to the city.
Speaker 4: I was going to say that there were polar bears
Speaker 4: at the Central Park Zoo, but apparently not, and I
Speaker 4: guess the latter. There was one that was euthanized due
Speaker 4: to an inoperable thyroid tumor at age twenty seven indoor
Speaker 4: twenty thirteen. I feel like I saw a No, I
Speaker 4: feel like I gussed. I think I saw it Gus
Speaker 4: years ago. But anyway, I guess the polar Bear isn't there.
Speaker 4: So could you put a dollar value on? Have people
Speaker 4: made attempts to put a dollar value on Flocco the owl?
Speaker 5: None? None that I've seen.
Speaker 3: Have you seen Andy Tracy?
Speaker 2: I haven't. I did look a little bit beforehand to
Speaker 2: see if I could see something like in terms of insurance.
Speaker 2: But I have a slightly different question if Flacco was
Speaker 2: worth if we could find a dollar amount for him
Speaker 2: and say, like, well, he's worth a million dollars, Let's
Speaker 2: say the insurance company says he's worth a million dollars,
Speaker 2: would he still be alive today?
Speaker 5: I don't know that that would have protected Flaco from
Speaker 5: flying into a building. Well, this is.
Speaker 2: Actually another debate within New York City, is like what
Speaker 2: accommodation should be made so that birds are no longer
Speaker 2: flying into all these skyscrapers that we have.
Speaker 5: Totally and I think that there are effective protections for birds.
Speaker 5: There's birds safe glass. You can put stickers on windows
Speaker 5: to make sure that birds can see them and don't
Speaker 5: fly into them. But all of this, you know, carries
Speaker 5: a cost to the developer or to the city to
Speaker 5: incentivize it, and you know, it has like a very
Speaker 5: real impact on the number of birds that are that
Speaker 5: are killed by flying into windows. There are around six
Speaker 5: hundred million birds that are killed every year by flying
Speaker 5: into windows. And talking about value to the value of birds,
Speaker 5: like this is a pretty significant value across the continent
Speaker 5: to have these birds alive. It's hard to see that
Speaker 5: value if you know, you just like live in a
Speaker 5: house and one or two birds hits your window every year.
Speaker 5: But thinking about birds as something that that like carries,
Speaker 5: you know, like an innate value that we can appreciate,
Speaker 5: but also like an economic value to our you know, agriculture,
Speaker 5: and kind of that shift in mentality I think can
Speaker 5: help individuals and help cities and help the country do
Speaker 5: things to protect birds.
Speaker 4: How concerned are you about the expansion of wind power
Speaker 4: and how big of a deal is that.
Speaker 5: I think that's an interesting question. The number of birds
Speaker 5: that are killed every year by flying into wind towers,
Speaker 5: you know, is around one hundred and fifty thousand. The
Speaker 5: number of birds killed by flying into windows is six
Speaker 5: hundred million. The number of birds killed by cats is
Speaker 5: about two point four billion.
Speaker 2: I was about to ask this question while staring.
Speaker 4: Wind is like hardly anything compared to these other no,
Speaker 4: And I think it's a distraction.
Speaker 2: Interesting, Okay, I was about to ask the cat question
Speaker 2: while staring at our cat owning producers in the window.
Speaker 2: Should we get rid of all the outdoor cats to
Speaker 2: save the birds? Should we put in restrictions?
Speaker 4: It's like very delightful sort of conversation, make angry half
Speaker 4: the population by one answer or another, turn into something controversial.
Speaker 5: It is a controversial question. It's been a controversial question
Speaker 5: for more than one hundred years. I think if you
Speaker 5: want to protect birds, you can't have cats outside. And
Speaker 5: there's a lot of debates about the best way to
Speaker 5: keep cats outside and eliminate outdoor cats. And you look
Speaker 5: at how people talked about this question again one hundred
Speaker 5: years ago, when they were thinking of birds as protecting
Speaker 5: our national security by ensuring our food supply, you know,
Speaker 5: they talked about it as a question of self preservation,
Speaker 5: you know, whether we keep cats or not because cats
Speaker 5: killed birds and birds protect our crops. As people said
Speaker 5: it one hundred years ago, it's a question of cat
Speaker 5: preservation or bird preservation.
Speaker 3: I still don't get there.
Speaker 4: Just fly kids can't fly.
Speaker 5: Well, there's a lot of birds, you know, a lot
Speaker 5: of the birds that cats kill. Our baby birds. Oh
Speaker 5: you know, they climb up the tree, they raid the nest,
Speaker 5: and they take out an entire bird family.
Speaker 2: Also, birds are I mean, some birds specifically are kind
Speaker 2: of dumber than you would say. So my my thirteen year.
Speaker 3: Old cat birds for just flying flying away.
Speaker 2: My thirteen year old cat many many years ago, and
Speaker 2: he had like a whole bunch of health problems. He had,
Speaker 2: you know, hyperthyroidism and a heart murmur. He managed to
Speaker 2: catch a turtle dove, which admittedly is one of the
Speaker 2: dumbest birds in the world. They're the ones that, like,
Speaker 2: when you're driving down the street, they're in the middle
Speaker 2: of the road and they will not move until the
Speaker 2: last second. But yeah, even that cat managed to catch
Speaker 2: a bird once, all right. Robert Francis, author of the
Speaker 2: bird history Substack, thank you so much for coming on.
Speaker 5: Athos, Thank you so much for having me. It's been
Speaker 5: a pleasure, Joe.
Speaker 2: I really enjoyed that conversation. Have I Are you interested
Speaker 2: in birds?
Speaker 4: Now?
Speaker 3: I am? I really enjoyed that. Am I interested in?
Speaker 2: Do you want to come to my place and look
Speaker 2: at the birds? We saw a bald eagle in our
Speaker 2: garden the other day.
Speaker 4: I do like seeing rare birds, and so I would
Speaker 4: like to see a bald egil.
Speaker 1: No.
Speaker 3: I really enjoyed that conversation. You know what I was
Speaker 3: thinking about, you know, the field that we discussed.
Speaker 4: It's pretty incredible that economic ornithology was a respective field.
Speaker 4: It almost feels like it should be called like ornithologic
Speaker 4: accounting or something like that. I always sort of think that,
Speaker 4: like a counting is a more legitimate form of economics.
Speaker 3: Than economics is.
Speaker 4: And yeah, a little spicy take for you there, but
Speaker 4: it seems like there's a lot to be said for
Speaker 4: fields where the primary method is like we're just going
Speaker 4: to count things, and we're going to count the number
Speaker 4: of birds. We're going to open up their stomachs, and
Speaker 4: we're going to count the number of mice, and we're
Speaker 4: going to count the number of grains that a typical
Speaker 4: mice eats, and then we're going to tally up the
Speaker 4: cost on one side and tally up the cost on
Speaker 4: the other side and see which is higher. Like, I
Speaker 4: find that to be a very interesting sort of like
Speaker 4: form of practice.
Speaker 2: I do also think that you can you can quipple
Speaker 2: with the methodology for some of the stuff and talk
Speaker 2: about whether economic ornithologists were over confident in the values
Speaker 2: that they were estimating. But it does help to focus
Speaker 2: people's minds and attitudes on the benefits of wildlife when
Speaker 2: you start actually attaching values to it. And I think
Speaker 2: we've seen instances of this over and over again, the
Speaker 2: vultures in India being another one. There was a mass
Speaker 2: die out of vultures in India and that ended up
Speaker 2: being extremely problematic and expensive, and before that people hadn't
Speaker 2: really thought about, well, what is the value of these vultures.
Speaker 2: So I do think it's useful in that sense to
Speaker 2: like sit and think through all these different connections in
Speaker 2: the ecosystem and the value you're deriving from it, whether
Speaker 2: it's in actual farming and growing things, or as Robert
Speaker 2: was saying, just in the idea that you get to
Speaker 2: enjoy the birds, you get to see Flacco flying high
Speaker 2: above the sky, although not anymore.
Speaker 3: Rip Flacco, Rip Flacco.
Speaker 4: Indeed, you know, I'm also just interested in this sort
Speaker 4: of US government history, and it is time when in
Speaker 4: the eighteen hundreds and then all through the nineteen hundreds
Speaker 4: where a lot of government bureaus and divisions and divisions
Speaker 4: of bureaus, et cetera, were about assisting this great process
Speaker 4: of turning the West, turning the land, whether it's agricultural land,
Speaker 4: into something useful. And so you end up with things
Speaker 4: like the Division of Economic Ornithology to help farmers and
Speaker 4: various bureaus that did or you know, all the various
Speaker 4: bureaus that helped build dams and build canals and turn
Speaker 4: the rivers into irrigation and things like that. It's interesting
Speaker 4: to find all these little niches within the expansion of
Speaker 4: government that really were like providing these services, whether information
Speaker 4: services or sort of infrastructure services to the people, sort
Speaker 4: of like figuring out how.
Speaker 3: To use the land.
Speaker 2: I like how you've come around to this, because it's
Speaker 2: basically industrial policy.
Speaker 3: Yeah right, yes, you get it all right.
Speaker 2: Shall we leave it there.
Speaker 3: Let's leave it there.
Speaker 2: This has been another episode of the Odd Lots podcast.
Speaker 2: I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway
Speaker 2: and I'm Joe Wisenthal.
Speaker 4: You can follow me at the Stalwart. Follow our guest
Speaker 4: Robert Francis at urbfr NCS and check out his substack
Speaker 4: bird History. Follow our producers Carman Rodriguez at Kerman Arman
Speaker 4: dash Ol Bennett at Dashbot and kel Brooks at kel Brooks.
Speaker 4: And thank you to our producer Moses One. For more
Speaker 4: Oddlats content, go to Bloomberg dot com slash odd Lots,
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