Okay, but... boobies!
6/4/202634 min
E25. The blue-footed booby has become an internet personality: cartoon feet, a goofy strut, a name that practically begs to be a punchline. But Scott sat down with Dr. Carlos Zavalaga, Universidad Científica del Sur, and one of the people who first taught him how to study seabirds in Peru, and the "fool" reputation falls apart fast. Get a booby in the air or underwater and you're watching one of the most specialized hunters in the bird family tree.
In this episode you'll hear about:
- How six-plus booby species carve up the same ocean without starving each other out
- What 20 years of GPS loggers, depth tags, and bags of fresh fish revealed about who eats what
- Why El Niño, avian flu, and overfishing keep stacking the deck against these birds
All audio, video, and images in this episode are either original to Okay, But... Birds (© Okay Media, LLC) or used under license/permission from the respective rights holders. Bird media from the Macaulay Library is used courtesy of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology as follows:
- Blue-footed Booby audio contributed by Robert I. Bowman, ML85906
- Red-footed Booby audio contributed by Robert I. Bowman, ML85911
- Brown Booby audio contributed by Gerritt Vyn, ML136211
- Masked Booby audio contributed by Chandler Robbins, ML32604
- Nazca Booby audio contributed by Oliver H. Hewitt, ML31543
- Peruvian Booby audio contributed by Ted Parker, ML29399
Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsScott Taylor· Host0:00
Yeah, I was definitely stressed out a lot of the time. [laughs] I think it was my first trip outside of, like, North America proper, and then I'm on these guano islands covered in ticks.
Carlos Zavalaga· Guest0:10
[upbeat music] Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay.
Scott Taylor· Host0:34
Let's get the obvious out of the way. Yes, this episode is called Okay, But Boobies, and I'm gonna say boobies about 30 more times in the next half hour. No, we're not gonna make it weird. Boobies are a real group of birds with a real Spanish-derived name, and once you know what they actually are, the joke kind of stops being a joke. The booby most people picture is the blue-footed booby. You probably haven't seen one in person, but you have absolutely seen one. Bright, almost cartoon blue feet, a goofy, high-stepping mating dance that has been clipped and reposted into oblivion. A face like it just walked into a room and forgot why. It's the kind of bird that gets stuck in your head as a personality first and as a species second, which is, I think, why most people picture exactly one booby and stop there. There are more, though. The red-footed. The brown. The masked. The Nazca.