PODCAST · science
Dumb Stupid Birds
by Christopher Kliebenstein
Dumb Stupid Birds is a short daily podcast covering one bird per episode. Real ornithology, wildlife science, and natural history with no filler and no nonsense. Birds are among the most bizarre, resilient, and quietly astonishing animals on the planet, and almost none of what you think you know about them is the full story. You'll finish every episode looking at the sky differently. Subscribe now, and if a bird has ever made you feel something, leave a rating.
Episodes
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Greater Roadrunner | It Never Needed To Fly | Dumb Stupid Birds #56
It is a cuckoo. It kills rattlesnakes by slamming them against the ground. Every morning it spreads its back feathers and lets the sun charge it like a battery. The Greater Roadrunner has been doing exactly this - running, hunting, thermoregulating - for four million years. The cartoon got almost...
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Red-necked Phalarope | She Left. He Stayed. | Dumb Stupid Birds #55
The female is brightly colored. The female competes aggressively for mates. The female lays the eggs - then leaves, immediately, to find another male. The male incubates alone for twenty days, raises the chicks alone, and weighs less than an ounce. It also invented rotational fluid dynamics to...
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African Jacana | Carrying Four Children On Two Wings | Dumb Stupid Birds #54
The African Jacana weighs less than a lemon, has toes long enough to walk on lily pads, and carries up to four live chicks tucked under its wings during predator escapes - just eight tiny legs visible from the outside. The female is twice the male's weight, holds territory, mates with multiple...
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Eurasian Wryneck | The Woodpecker That Quit | Dumb Stupid Birds #52
The Eurasian wryneck is a woodpecker that cannot drill, will not excavate its own nest, and eats almost nothing but ants off the ground. Cornered, it twists its neck nearly half a turn and hisses like a snake. The ancient Greeks spun it on strings in love spells, and its genus name, Jynx, is…
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Clark's Nutcracker | The Bird That Plants Forests by Accident | Dumb Stupid Birds #51
The Clark's nutcracker buries between thirty thousand and a hundred thousand pine seeds every autumn, hauling them in a pouch under its tongue and remembering thousands of individual caches under deep snow for up to nine months. The forgotten ones grow. Every whitebark pine forest in the high...
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North Island Brown Kiwi | A Bird Pretending To Be A Mammal | Dumb Stupid Birds #50
The kiwi hunts by smell, the only bird with nostrils at the tip of its beak. It has whiskers, heavy marrow-filled bones, fur-like feathers, and two working ovaries. The female lays an egg up to 20 percent of its body weight, so large the bird has to stop eating to finish it. Its closest relative…
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Ruff | Three Males, One Frozen Gene | Dumb Stupid Birds #49
The ruff comes in three permanent kinds of male: one fights, one freeloads, and one disguises itself as a female to slip past both. Which one a ruff becomes is fixed before hatching, locked in a chunk of chromosome that flipped backwards around four million years ago. Inherit two copies and the...
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Standard-winged Nightjar | Two Feathers, Three Birds | Dumb Stupid Birds #48
During breeding season, male standard-winged nightjars grow a single feather on each wing into a two-foot bare shaft with a flag on the end. In flight, the flags trail behind so precisely that one bird looks like three birds flying in formation. After about six weeks, the feathers shed, break…
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Egyptian Vulture | Threw Rocks Before You Did | Dumb Stupid Birds #47
The Egyptian vulture is two feet tall, weighs about four pounds, and breaks open ostrich eggs by picking up rocks and throwing them. It also eats the dung of cows, sheep, and goats to absorb carotenoids that turn its face bright yellow, because a yellower face is more attractive to other Egyptian...
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Common Murre | Throws Its Kids Off Cliffs | Dumb Stupid Birds #46
The common murre lays a single pear-shaped egg directly on bare rock, packs twenty birds per square meter, and at three weeks old encourages its flightless chick to step off a six-hundred-foot cliff. Survival rate above ninety percent. Then both go to sea for two months, alone, in the dark, until...
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Burrowing Owl | The Owl That Farms Beetles | Dumb Stupid Birds #45
The burrowing owl is nine inches tall, lives underground, hunts in broad daylight, and uses cow dung to bait dung beetles into a hole. When threatened, the chicks impersonate a western diamondback rattlesnake well enough to fool real ground squirrels. Fifteen million years of evolution went into…
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Superb Bird-of-Paradise | It Built Its Own Lighting | Dumb Stupid Birds #44
The superb bird-of-paradise is a forgettable black bird in New Guinea until it sweeps a stage, snaps into a hovering oval, and becomes a glowing face. Its feathers absorb up to 99.95 percent of light, a structural super-black measured at Harvard in 2018, rivaling materials built in labs. That…
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Great Bowerbird | It Invented Forced Perspective | Dumb Stupid Birds #43
The great bowerbird is a drab grey-brown crow relative that builds a stick avenue, then sorts thousands of bones and stones by size to bend depth, the same optical trick film crews use to cheat scale. A 2012 study in Science found that the better the illusion, the more it mated. Scramble the...
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Malleefowl | It Invented The Thermostat | Dumb Stupid Birds #42
The malleefowl buries its eggs in a meter-tall mound of rotting leaves and sand, then holds it at exactly thirty-three degrees Celsius for weeks by probing the dirt with its beak like a living thermometer. It does this up to eleven months a year and never sits on the eggs once. The chicks dig...
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Marabou Stork | The Undertaker Bird | Dumb Stupid Birds #41
The marabou stork stands five feet tall, has a ten-foot wingspan tying with the Andean condor, a bald pink head, and a foot-long fleshy pouch dangling from its throat that it uses to flirt. It eats anything from rotting elephant to plastic bags, tolerates anthrax, and quietly prevents disease...
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Club-winged Manakin | The Bird That Plays Violin | Dumb Stupid Birds #40
The club-winged manakin is a twelve gram bird in the Andean cloud forest that produces sound by vibrating two specialized wing feathers against each other 107 times per second, like a cricket. It is the only known vertebrate that makes noise through stridulation. To do this, the species rebuilt…
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Southern Cassowary | The Bird That Plants the Forest | Dumb Stupid Birds #39
The southern cassowary stands five and a half feet tall in the rainforests of northeastern Australia, weighs one hundred thirty pounds, and carries a five-inch dagger on each foot. It communicates in twenty-three hertz infrasound, lays grapefruit-sized green eggs, and is the sole disperser for…
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Helmeted Hornbill | Solid Ivory In Its Skull | Dumb Stupid Birds #38
The helmeted hornbill: three kilograms, solid keratin casque, hunted for red ivory at five times the price of elephant tusk. Adult birds joust mid-air at twenty kilometers per hour over fig trees. Six thousand killed in West Kalimantan between 2012 and 2017. The only bird willing to use its own...
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Black Kite | The Bird That Commits Arson | Dumb Stupid Birds #37
Milvus migrans is a medium-sized raptor, about fifty centimeters long, six million strong across four continents, and it eats garbage for a living. In northern Australia, three raptor species including the black kite have been documented carrying smoldering sticks from active wildfires and…
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Hoopoe | Beautiful, Ancient, And Absolutely Rancid | Dumb Stupid Birds #36
The hoopoe wears a crown of cinnamon feathers tipped in black, appears in tomb art in ancient Egypt, in Aristotle, in the Bible, in the Quran, and tells everyone its name in three soft notes. It is also the national bird of Israel. During breeding season, hoopoes coat their nest in a bacterial...
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Tawny Frogmouth | The Bird Pretending To Be A Stick | Dumb Stupid Birds #35
The Tawny Frogmouth lives across Australia, weighs under a pound, and survives by sitting on a branch and pretending to be the branch. They are not owls, they mate for life, and they have been at this for tens of millions of years. A 2018 study found rodenticide residues in over ninety percent of...
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Black Heron | Brought a Parasol to Work | Dumb Stupid Birds #34
The black heron is fifty centimeters of black feathers and yellow legs, found across sub-Saharan Africa wherever water sits shallow. It hunts by pulling its wings forward into a sealed dome over its head, turning itself, briefly, into a small umbrella. The shade kills surface glare and attracts...
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American Woodcock | Brain Installed Upside Down | Dumb Stupid Birds #33
The American woodcock has eyes mounted at the very top of its skull, giving it 360 degree vision while its beak is buried in mud. To make room, evolution rotated the bird's brain upside down. The cerebellum sits at the bottom of the skull and the bird cannot see what is directly in front of its…
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Snowy Sheathbill | Antarctica's Unpaid Janitor | Dumb Stupid Birds #32
The Snowy Sheathbill is the only land bird native to Antarctica, weighs 1.3 pounds, looks like a clean white pigeon, and has no webbed feet despite living on islands surrounded by frigid ocean. It eats penguin feces, seal afterbirth, and krill stolen mid-handoff from baby penguins, intercepting…
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Fork-tailed Drongo | The Bird That Lies For A Living | Dumb Stupid Birds #31
The fork-tailed drongo is a small black African songbird that screams fake eagle alarms to scam meerkats out of their food. About twenty-three percent of its daily diet is stolen this way. When the meerkats catch on, the drongo switches voices and mimics the alarm calls of fifty other species.…
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Vampire Ground Finch | Yes, It Drinks Blood | Dumb Stupid Birds #30
A Darwin's finch on two specks of basalt in the Pacific where it almost never rains. Roughly twelve hundred individuals on Wolf and Darwin Islands. With no fresh water, the species solved the thirst problem by drinking the blood of much larger seabirds, pecking at the base of Nazca booby feathers...
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Common Potoo | Watches You Through Closed Eyes | Dumb Stupid Birds #29
The common potoo spends fourteen hours a day balanced on a broken branch, beak pointed up, watching through slits in its closed eyelids. It does not build a nest. It hunts moths at dusk, sings one of the most haunting sounds in the Amazon at night, and has spent fifty million years perfecting the...
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Sociable Weaver | The Hundred-Year Apartment Block | Dumb Stupid Birds #28
The sociable weaver weighs twenty-six grams, lives in southern Africa, and builds the largest communal structure made by any bird species on Earth. Up to five hundred birds, a hundred chambers, a metric ton of woven grass, and a hundred years of continuous occupation. Their nests bring down…
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White Bellbird | The Loudest Living Thing | Dumb Stupid Birds #27
At 125.4 decibels, the white bellbird produces the loudest call ever measured from any bird on Earth, louder than a chainsaw and well past the threshold for permanent human hearing damage. It does not broadcast this scream across the canopy. It saves it for one specific moment, pivots, and...
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Hammerkop | Built A Fortress Out Of Spite | Dumb Stupid Birds #26
The hammerkop weighs 470 grams and builds a nest the size of a small refrigerator. Five feet across, up to 8,000 sticks, plastered with mud and dung, strong enough to hold an adult human standing on top. It takes ten to fourteen weeks. The pair often abandons it and starts another. The fortress…
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Wandering Albatross | Built To Almost Never Land | Dumb Stupid Birds #25
Twelve foot wingspan, the largest of any living bird. A young wandering albatross fledges from a subantarctic island and stays in the air for up to ten years before touching land again, sleeping mid-flight by shutting down half its brain at a time. It can travel five hundred miles a day on...
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Kea | The Parrot That Laughs | Dumb Stupid Birds #24
The kea is the only alpine parrot in the world. Forty-eight centimeters of olive-green feathers living above the tree line in the snow of New Zealand's Southern Alps, solving multi-step puzzles at the level of great apes, and the only known non-mammal that laughs contagiously. Fewer than 5,000...
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Secretarybird | Kicks Snakes For A Living | Dumb Stupid Birds #23
The secretarybird is a four-foot raptor that hunts by walking. It kicks snakes to death with five times its own body weight, delivered in fifteen milliseconds. It has eyelashes. It appears on the coat of arms of two countries. It was reclassified as Endangered in 2020 and there may be fewer than...
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Magnificent Frigatebird | The Seabird That Drowns | Dumb Stupid Birds #22
The magnificent frigatebird has an eight-foot wingspan, a three-and-a-half-pound body, and the lightest skeleton of any bird ever measured. It is a seabird that cannot get its feathers wet. If it touches the ocean, it drowns. So it stopped landing. The longest tracked continuous flight is...
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Bearded Vulture | The Bird That Eats Skeletons | Dumb Stupid Birds #21
The bearded vulture has a stomach pH around 0.7, roughly car battery acid. It swallows small bones whole and carries the large ones to altitude, dropping them on specific rock slabs until they shatter. It also dyes its own head and chest rust-orange by bathing in iron-rich mud, purely for status....
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Hooded Pitohui | Yes, It's Actually Poisonous | Dumb Stupid Birds #20
The hooded pitohui is a nine-inch orange and black songbird from New Guinea. Its feathers carry batrachotoxin, the same neurotoxin found in the golden poison frog, roughly ten times more potent than strychnine. Western science noticed this in 1992, after a graduate student got a cut on his hand...
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Curl-crested Aracari | Nature's Curling Iron | Dumb Stupid Birds #19
The curl-crested aracari lives in a narrow slice of the southwestern Amazon and grows feathers on its head that are curled into tight, glossy coils. They look like strips of black electrical tape. Under a microscope, each one is a single feather with widened, flattened barbs fused into a hollow...
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Anna's Hummingbird | The Smallest Fighter Pilot On Earth | Dumb Stupid Birds #18
The Anna's Hummingbird weighs four and a half grams, beats its wings fifty times per second, and dives at fifty one miles per hour. Measured in body lengths per second, that is three hundred and eighty five, faster than a peregrine falcon. It pulls over nine g on the recovery, the same force that...
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Oilbird | The Bird That Was Literally Lamp Fuel | Dumb Stupid Birds #17
The oilbird lives in pitch black caves in northern Venezuela, navigates by echolocation at two kilohertz (which is audible to humans and sounds like hundreds of screaming children), flies up to seventy-five miles a night to eat fruit, and was named Oilbird because indigenous communities used to...
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Bar-tailed Godwit | It Ate Itself and Kept Flying | Dumb Stupid Birds #16
The bar-tailed godwit flies 7,258 miles from Alaska to New Zealand without stopping. Before takeoff, it shrinks its own kidneys, liver, and intestines by up to twenty-five percent to save weight. There are roughly 150,000 of them, and they have been doing this for tens of thousands of years. The...
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Greater Honeyguide | It Trained Us | Dumb Stupid Birds #15
Indicator indicator: twelve grams, eats beeswax almost nothing else can digest, communicates with wild humans using a co-evolved call-and-response system documented in a 2016 Science paper, and hatches with temporary hooked mandibles it uses to kill every other nestling in the nest. The hooks…
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Arctic Tern | The Bird That Quit Winter | Dumb Stupid Birds #14
One hundred grams. 44,000 miles a year, pole to pole, for thirty years straight. Over a lifetime, the Arctic tern logs roughly 1.5 million miles - three round trips to the Moon - on wings that span two and a half feet. It sees more daylight than any animal on Earth because it simply decided…
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Superb Lyrebird | A Throat That Works in Stereo | Dumb Stupid Birds #13
Thirty million years of evolution, a syrinx that produces two sounds simultaneously, and a memory that holds a flute melody played by a stranger who left years ago. The superb lyrebird mimics over twenty species, chainsaws, camera shutters, and car alarms with fidelity that fools the originals.…
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Common Swift | Three Years Without Landing | Dumb Stupid Birds #12
The common swift eats, sleeps, drinks, and mates in the air. A 2016 study tracked one group for ten months straight and logged zero landings. Its scientific name, Apus apus, means "without feet" because Aristotle watched swifts and decided they did not have any. A single swift can fly four…
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Hoatzin | Smells Like a Cow For a Reason | Dumb Stupid Birds #11
The hoatzin is a pheasant-sized Amazonian bird with a mohawk, no close living relatives, and the only foregut fermentation chamber ever evolved inside a bird. It ferments leaves in its throat like a cow, smells exactly like a barn, and has given up most of its flight muscles to make room for the...
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Kakapo | The Bird That Boomed Into a Hole | Dumb Stupid Birds #10
The kakapo is a four-kilogram flightless parrot that sits in a dirt bowl and shouts 60Hz bass notes into the dark for three months a year. It has been doing this, mostly unsuccessfully, for sixty million years.
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Shoebill | It Was Here Before Us | Dumb Stupid Birds #9
The shoebill stands five feet tall in a Central African swamp, does not move for hours, and hunts by falling forward onto things. It is classified as Vulnerable. There are fewer than 5,300 left. It looks like something that should have gone extinct with the dinosaurs, and it stares at you like it...
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Blue Jay | The Bird That Planted a Forest | Dumb Stupid Birds #8
The blue jay is loud, obnoxious, impersonates hawks for personal gain, and is not actually blue. It is also, incidentally, responsible for replanting the entire eastern deciduous forest of North America after the last ice age. You're welcome.
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Belted Kingfisher | Built Different | Dumb Stupid Birds #7
The belted kingfisher is top-heavy, ragingly territorial, named after a Greek myth, and the only bird in North America where the female is more colorful than the male. It nests inside a tunnel it digs with its face. It has been doing this, loudly, near every river on the continent, for at least...
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Ostrich | Eyes Bigger Than Its Brain | Dumb Stupid Birds #6
The ostrich is the largest bird alive, the fastest two-legged animal on Earth, and the only bird whose eyes are literally bigger than its brain. It does not bury its head in the sand. What it actually does is considerably more interesting and considerably more violent.
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Dumb Stupid Birds is a short daily podcast covering one bird per episode. Real ornithology, wildlife science, and natural history with no filler and no nonsense. Birds are among the most bizarre, resilient, and quietly astonishing animals on the planet, and almost none of what you think you know about them is the full story. You'll finish every episode looking at the sky differently. Subscribe now, and if a bird has ever made you feel something, leave a rating.
HOSTED BY
Christopher Kliebenstein
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Dumb Stupid Birds have?
Dumb Stupid Birds currently has 55 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Dumb Stupid Birds about?
Dumb Stupid Birds is a short daily podcast covering one bird per episode. Real ornithology, wildlife science, and natural history with no filler and no nonsense. Birds are among the most bizarre, resilient, and quietly astonishing animals on the planet, and almost none of what you think you know...
How often does Dumb Stupid Birds release new episodes?
Dumb Stupid Birds has 55 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to Dumb Stupid Birds?
You can listen to Dumb Stupid Birds on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Dumb Stupid Birds?
Dumb Stupid Birds is created and hosted by Christopher Kliebenstein.
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