in, 150 national forests. camping with the president was, a remarkable experience. muir later said. i fairly fell in love with them, so the two of them together, i think, you know, did a lot of good that's great. that's a great place to end. thank you, dean. thank you. love them. appreciate it. thank you.good.

evening, everybody. welcome to the north carolina museum of natural sciences. thank you so much for coming out to tonight's thank you for tuning in. if you're watching with us live online, we've a very special program for you tonight.

we have just a whole stage full of brilliant people not including myself, of course. my name is chris smith. i work here at the museum of natural sciences as the coordinator for current programs that job title means that i get the pleasure and privilege of welcoming everybody into the museum. it also means that i get to really interesting people who are doing interesting out there in the realms of science, technology, engineering, mathematics, art as it relates to science, education, and even more. and so it's always thrill to be here in the museum talking about science, nature, conservation, any of those great and fabulous topics that make this museum such a great resource and such a great to be, to my left, you can see these are the brilliant people that i've been joined with. first, i want to dr. michael cove closest to me. oh, yeah, yeah. we could clap for dr. co mike serves the research curator from

mammalogy here at the museum of natural sciences. he is an expert on rats. but i a particular type of rat actually. you know what i'm going to say? he knows a whole lot about a whole lot of mammals. we had an event not too long ago here at the museum and the audience was peppering dr. here with questions about all types of different animals from all regions of the planet. and he right the top of his mind. incredible answers, great questions from, you know, rats live in the appalachian mountains to kathy barras in south america. it was a great, great talk. so thanks for being here, mike. thank you for having me. and let's talk about pests pests. and then across the way, we have dr. roland hayes. roland serves, as the head of the biodiversity research lab here at the museum, his glass walled research is over in the nature research center. he's also a professor at north carolina state university teaching zoology and an expert

zoologist. but dr. kays is particularly skilled in the realms of animal tracking, maybe not so much as like, like sniffing animal tracks in forests and knowing which way they went. although would believe that you're very good at that as well i mean, if there's snow, i can do it. that's perfect. but also more technology, modern techniques of animal trapping, particular like things like camera traps and tracking. great. happy to be here. thanks, rohan. and then course, the reason that all the three of us here and the reason here at the museum tonight is to hear about the new book, pests how humans create animal villains. and tonight we have a very special guest, dr. bethany brookshire. our bethany's a science journalist. you could read bethany his work in the washington post, new york times slate, the and then of course, places like scientific american science news was a

former staff writer for science news for students which i actually scrolled through the archive and just like so many things that i need to learn about in the archive there. so i'm going to go be a student science history since i and we're very excited that we have experts and animals that some people consider passe here at the museum. and bethany, that you could be with us to talk about your new book and share with us some of the cool science and stories you investigated. so let's get to if could. i'm going to take a seat. thank you for letting me join tonight's conversation as well. just testing that. so. so. okay, let's get started. i guess the best place to start is bethany. tell us about the book. what's the what's the sales pitch for? yeah. so i started i started researching this book all the way back in 16 when the idea first happened. but i have become obsessed with

pests because what is a pest? right. when you really think hard about it, a pest is an animal that makes you it's an animal that -- you off. and that means that a pest has nothing to do with what the animal is, where it's going, what it's doing. and it has everything to do with you and what you think your environment should be like, who should be in it, who belongs near with your stuff etc. and. so i just became fascinated by concept of pests and i also that almost everyone you talk to when you talk to them about pests, everybody has pest story. so my pest story, which is featured in book involves can i cuss here. i don't know. you're the boss. i think c-span i cuss. can i get a. okay? that looks like a thumbs up.

all i think the three of us work for the state of north carolina. you do not. i do not. okay, good. the squirrel that i am talking about. his name is kevin. we call him kevin for short. and because a three year old lives next door. but kevin is an eastern gray, otherwise known as sirius. carolyn insists. and kevin lives in my yard and i hate him so much this kevin, this squirrel we now call all squirrels kevin in house. so we'll just be walking around and be like kevin, this squirrel is the reason that i have not had a tomato from my garden in five years, because every time i go out i plant tomatoes. i'm super excited. the tomatoes grow, they swell. they are green, they are hopeful. and kevin, kevin comes into my garden, he grabs a nice green tomato and he takes a big bite. and then kevin recalls that he does not, in fact, like tomatoes he leaves it with its tooth marks it right where i can see

it on my porch because he is a jerk. then the next day he does it again and again and again. this squirrel has taken a bite out of every single in my garden for the last five years, and i've tried many to get rid of him, including bird netting, metal netting, kind pepper, stray cats. i in fact try stray cats. one pest versus another. i know the two cats actually came inside. we now have pets, but kevin just ate cat food. maybe you need to bring kevin inside. let's not fight and. i began to realize i just hated this animal. but i would bring it up to my friends and would be like, oh, but you can't hurt. him, he's a squirrel. he's tougher, but he's sweet. and they would, you know, take pictures of the squirrel. people feed squirrels, deliver brightly, people set up obstacle courses, they go viral on youtube for these animals.

and i realized that every animal could be a pest to someone. it just mattered in ways. and so wrote this book. so i had never had a problem with squirrels literally yet they've never been a pest. no. until this morning when you're kevin's girlfriend showed up in my attic. never. today i'm like getting, dressed to come here for this event with bethany and is literally a squirrel that had had broken into my attic, had crawled had clawed through some stuff, had this giant nest, had leaves and -- all the place, and that literally never happened in my life until today. i'm so proud to feel like i'm her. i think you're cursed. it's possible. we actually did have one that got in my roof in one of the places that i rented because. there were holes in the roof. there we go. we named big bertha because she was so big the squirrel when she

like you think a squirrel would make a little thump noise? no, this was a every time she looks good. the guy who caught her said it was big a squirrel who everything. i think he told me he took her a farm upstate. i did not. yeah right. upstate mike at this point. i'm hoping that you have a good squirrel story. are you going to at least say that you like squirrel? no. this is really interesting because i have been thinking about this a lot. well, i live a little further outside of raleigh. and my wife, my wife has pet goats and she had some sunflower seeds for the goats and they stayed in the trunk in her car for a long weekend and by the end of the weekend, squirrels had chewed up through to the underside of the bumper into the trunk and looted all of these whatever sunflower seeds for the goats.

and so, yeah, that bumper was held together duct tape for a substantial amount time. so i but i've never actually thought of them as pests say. but it is that you're mentioning this tomato thing because this is an idea that had for a while is like how much do urban squirrels actually garbage or or our soft, fleshy fruits and resources because they mostly eat acorns and stuff and there's usually not a shortage of oaks. we live the city of oaks, right? so it is interesting to hear that they're eating things than, you know. they're birdseed. they're eating a lot of birdseed. true. i just i just think of them as eating hard things and not soft things like well that's why they didn't finish your. yeah, yeah. they were like, i thought this was a green nut and i was. what i found fascinating is that the always figured out. so one year i was like, all right, you know, nuclear option i planted no tomatoes, i planted

halloween, no peppers instead. and i was like, oh yeah, i had this vision squirrel running away with tears streaming down furry cheeks, squirrels weep, but i can dream anyway. he did not eat them. he never touched that jalapeno pepper. not a single one. every single time i've grown hot, he knows not a single one is made out of it. but this is. this is kind of the more of your of your book, right? it's like sometimes needs to change their behaviors. and so the animal. so you need to become a healthier farmer instead of a tomato farmer. actually, what i did was i figured out i learned things about the spatial memory of squirrels and i learned that they have incredibly in highly accurate spatial memories. and so what you do is, you have to set up your tomato cage over your tomatoes before the tomatoes emerge. if come if you wait until the tomatoes emerge edge which i tried this when the tomatoes emerged, i bought a large gardener's cage. i spent all setting it up. i was feeling really good about myself. i go off to my friend's house and i get this text from my

husband. could you please come home? and i'm like, why? and he sends this video? there are two squirrels that have gotten into the gardener's cage and are now bouncing around like furry ping pong because they can't get out. and he had to let them. 20 minutes later they were back in. he let them out again and yeah, so then it turned into it made us anti squirrel fortress involving chicken wire and the gardener's cage bricks. but this year gardener's cage needs to go up early because if do not taste the thing, they do not know it is there and they will not come and get it. so the moral of the story is to learn about your squirrel behavior and set up your garden cage very early. so sounds like part of the criteria for some critter being deemed a pest, at least is they have to be able to outsmart us regularly if we're at least as this the whole squirrels thing is like okay they consistently get around whatever it that we

don't we set up to stop them also they consistently frustrate us because they can do those two things. and so it's like we get angry, we try to stop them, but they are just able to get around us at every turn. does that hold true for a set that's like not squirrels, or is it particular to. yes, i actually ended up writing a lot about this in a section in roland is cited several times because so much of what we call pest is about power and. it's about vulnerability. it's about animals that make us feel powerless that make us feel scared. and these once they make us feel powerless and scared, our fear turns to anger. our anger turns to hate. we turn to the dark side and it's all downhill from there. and one of those animals that really exemplifies that is actually the coyote, which ended up talking to roland about and

coyotes have been spreading for some time. and they're causing people issues. and i would love to hear your take on why coyotes are spreading where they are and why they're into more suburban environments. on the east coast in particular, you're so so coyotes were originally a western species. they lived in grassland deserts, open habitats in the western united in mexico and up into canada and then around the early 1900s, 1910, 1920, they started moving, expanding all directions. and so if you think about environment like to the north, they moved into the great northern forests canada and up to alaska, to the south they moved south into the rainforest. so they weren't really forest before. but as we fragment the forest there's more farm fields can they can handle a little bit of forests. so they move now all the way to panama they're on the verge of entering south america. they haven't entered yet, as far as we know, but right at the edge, we've got some camera traps that have gotten them in

the darién rainforest. and then the east coast was, this great bit of forest that they never used to in. now it's fragmented there's more fields as as forest and there's coyotes all over the place. and so as coyotes moved east, they colonized, you know, the better for them first, which would have been the more fields and a little bit of forest. but eventually they moved into the deep forest and eventually they fill that up and they started moving into cities because you know, a young coyote grows up and if he goes into the nice park, he's going to get beat up by the other coyotes. and if he goes into the neighborhood, well, maybe he can skin scrape out of living there. and so they've been sort of slowly across the east coast cities, more and more, i think here in raleigh kind of showed up in the county in like the nineties and and in to the more cities only kind recently started into the developed areas of raleigh and so they are just ultimate in adaptability they can eat fruit they can eat they

can catch small prey, they can do okay with big prey. they're not really that good. they more often will scavenge roadkill. they'll eat some garbage, but usually not a lot, but sometimes little bit. they'll eat, certainly cats even better. cat if you put out cat food, kyra is going to be quite attracted to that. and so they've they've come in and in some ways it's probably we got rid of the wolves, right? wolves were considered a pest a couple hundred years ago. and so we killed almost all of them. and that kind of opened up the space for the coyote to expand and coyotes have become a pest, some people in some places, but a lot of places not. and so i think it's interesting to see like a lot of places, they're sort of filling in for the ecologically not totally, definitely, completely, but, you know, whether they're a pest, sometimes we use the word invasive species, right. like an invasive. so they are exotic in that they're they didn't used to be here.

they're not introduced. sometimes we use the word introduced. they weren't introduced. they got here on their own. we can see they're spread. and whether they're invasive whether they're a pest is sort of are they harm to humans, human societies or sort of other invasive species, other native species are causing problems. and there's some places where they do that and there's a lot of places that they don't. on average, they're not that big of a pest, i think. but where they are a they're one of the bigger, sort of scary to pass out there. it's really fascinating to me how many of the people who i interviewed for the book who had had like personal interact with pests. right, they'd facing you always hear this, oh my goodness, i had a rat. it was the size of a cat. no, it wasn't i am sorry. it was not. there has been no recorded wild brown norway rat that has been over £2. i know a guy. the rodents ologist bobby corrigan. he carries around a check in

wallet. he showed it to me for $500 for the first person who can hand him a £2 rat. and he has never used check. okay, you tell me that rat is the size of a cat. that's a kitten. like, is there in the research collection, we can make $500 off of him. probably not different species. i got him pouched rat. those are big. those. are big. there's there's such a thing. but it's just really interesting when we have an interaction that makes us feel powerless and that makes us feel scared. all of a the animal grows in our and it becomes huge, right? the raccoon becomes the size of a large dog. the coyote is the size of a wolf. it's not. well, i mean, coyotes look big, right? they are are true. they're they're very lean. and people compare it with their dogs because people know how much their dog weigh. their dogs weigh. and many people have like a £50 dog. i'm a £50 dog and they see a coyote. they're like it the size of my dog. it was £50. and and i understand that have a

£50 dog and i think i reason i would approximate them approximate their to be about the size of my dog. but the truth is there are all the coyotes very rarely can get to £50, but on average in the east coast they're like £35. and in the west coast are even smaller. they're like £25. so they're, you know, on the west coast on average, they're half the size of my dog. it is they're so lean and fluffy and and lanky, tall, lanky. yeah. and and other interesting thing is, has actually been if you hear them howl, it sounds like a huge pack. oh there must have been ten or 15 of them. and people there's a paper on this where they published they experimentally played people different numbers of priorities howling and people consistently always overestimate it. it's almost like like the it's probably part of the of the evolution of their howl. they want their house to sound like a bigger group. and so the way that they do it makes it sound like a bigger group. people fall for it all the time. yeah. oh, my goodness.

i did not know that. that's amazing. how did i miss this paper? i had to be a spa to know. it was very funny. when i was reporting on coyotes in calif, one of my sources was super happy. he was like, i'm going to show you the coyotes and golden gate. it's going to be great. at golden gate, we were in hollywood. so he's i'm gonna show you that it's going to be great and we're there and we're waiting. and the coyotes come out i'm like, that's it. he's like, excuse me? i'm like, well, they're so our coyotes much bigger than that. he got all mad me, but i actually a road called coyote outside of washington, d.c. the other day i was so excited i almost pulled over like, this is who you become. well, and so the reason that eastern priorities are larger is that before, as they were moving east, they actually hybridize with wolves. and they've got some wolf genes mixed in and then they also hybridized dogs as they moved it so that some dog genes, it makes sense on average, this sort of eastern coyote, it's still 80 to 90%.

what coyotes are 89% coyote, but it's got 5 to 8% of dog genes and 5 to 8% of wolf genes. and they're all mixed in a great experiment. evolution, right? if those genes help it survive. then they're going to survive better in their passes genes on. and we've actually shown that some of the wolf genes that we're pretty sure we don't know exactly what they do but from the dog we have a pretty decent idea that they're associated with growth and bone growth and muscle growth that those genes are surviving better and helping coyotes survive better and being passed on. and so that's part of why eastern coyotes are sort of 35 to £45, whereas western countries are 25 to £35. i just love the of imagining like an expanding tinder profile. so he's like i just matched with anybody. it's like, oh, poodle, poodle, labrador poodle golden shepherd, german shepherd. fine, i'll take the poodle. well, that's how we think it happens actually. is that right. the first coyote that got into north carolina spring time came

along. she had no one else to breed with. other ideas were there because she was the first one. and, you know, they're pretty dedicated breeders. and so i got to take the next best thing they can get. oh man. i'm just waiting for the dachshund, the coyote dachshund hybrid. well, that's so that's actually we're. can we. yes. what would you call that, a duck, jodi duck. a question. well, this is part of where. so the when do coyotes become passed and do they become invasive and cause problems? what situations is attacking dogs? and we've been actually surveying, if you look in like i have a google news any time coyotes make the news which is pretty much every single day and a lot of times because they attack dogs and they're almost always small dogs and often like someone lets their dog out and it doesn't need to go to the bathroom at night doesn't come back, but sometimes i mean, there was just a video the other day of this i felt felt terrible for us. old lady in l.a. what? her chihuahua on leash. a coyote comes up, yanks it off

the leash, and it's not breeding with it. it's it's i think it's i don't we think it might be aggressive. i don't think they're eating them. i don't know. we don't really know. but the small dogs and coyotes. not a good mate. i've taken to calling chihuahuas, walking coyotes, snickers. yep, yep. coyotes snickers. snickers. um, yeah. oh, my god. when they're hangry. yes, that is. oh, yeah. alligators considered pests. certainly floridians do not enjoy them. i personally maintain that if the alligator is eating you, you are moving too slow. have considered moving faster. but no i mean alligators routinely kill people and dogs, you know, and i think it's interesting how we sometimes more tolerant of that when it's happening in places that we deem to be wilderness. so it's happening somewhere like

the everglades. well, that's the wilderness. you know, brown bears, for example, kill one or two people a year. i mean, they're they're big. they're very big. and if they don't want you to be there, they will find a way to make you leave by means necessary. and we're kind of okay with. right. like that's what it's a charismatic megafauna. right. and they out there in the wilderness and they don't realize people don't realize i think that there's no such thing as wilderness. there's no such as a place has should have no people in it a place that is for animals and a place that is for humans. right? every place that we live, we form our own ecology. and some of these animals are going to take advantage of that ecology. you know, the mention of florida puts me in mind of animals like pythons in florida like there's apparently a lot in florida that we could talk about, a lot animals that are considered pests, perhaps gators, maybe.

but there's also non-native species like pythons, tegus, tegus i don't even know what a tiger is it? yeah, argentinean big lizard from not to mention the giant african land snail. yeah. and the monkeys. the monkeys candy bars. florida. florida has more invasive species. exotic introduced species, free living than anywhere else. i think florida. i think florida is the australia of the united states. yeah. and so are all of these then if we if we take sort of the you've been giving for pests you know are the in florida a pest, are tegus a pest or are they non-nato if they can survive there, but they're not like you mentioned and you know, are they doing harm or what harm are they doing? and what's the threshold for a python or a tail? you yeah. so think, you know, some of species are fairly benign, you

know, tons of animals, small things like that. it's unclear if they played any kind of role other than prey for for bigger things. but when you're dealing with the tegus, the burmese python, there are breeding populations of boa constrictors, nile monitor ers, you know, there's not really very many you know, as we see from the work with the burmese pythons, burmese are gigantic snakes and, yet they're cryptic enough that somehow now they were, you know mass populating the everglades before. anyone noticed for a couple of decades we have no choice but to stay right. and so i that you know their impact unequivocal in terms of their no more mammals left i'm the mammal right there's no more mammals left even study in parts of the everglades because the

pythons have literally consumed to the mall and they can just sit there the beauty of being a python is you have such a slow metabolism that you could last you could last 500 days without eating if you've got the fat reserves and so they could just sit wait for new prey to to eventually migrate in or move in or repopulate. but they are also shifting their diets right. so we see, you know, where i work in in the florida keys and in key largo is an endangered island ecosystem. and so now we're studying their impacts, the endangered rodents. they're the endemic key largo would read key largo cottonmouth. and, you know, compared to the everglades. we're only just now the prevalence of the pythons and we're effectively at the front end of that invasion curve where they're the populations growing that we're hoping to be able to manage it and and contain it and prevent that, you know,

extinction events of endangered rodents. and we're lucky we observed it early enough in in this case. but it it that's an easy system to work because it's contained. but i i think that know the the northern invasion front of the pythons there's really anything stopping them cars right they get hit by cars and they and the the state of florida has python roundups. but if look at the data these roundups are removing, you know, a couple hundred pythons a year they're contractors for them there's i mean we're we're you know the folks out there are throwing everything that they possibly can at at just not not removing pythons, just figuring out a way to find the pythons in order to remove them. but that that northern invasion front it's you know slowly expanding northward. and if you look at the climate

climate models of of like they're suitable niche space in the climate what they can withstand they can it all the way up into north carolina and that's without any kind of, you know, warming your eyes. right. so, i mean, a slow, steady slithering front there, but we need to be and managing at that. and so part of my work in the keys that we talked about in the book was trying to, you know, mitigate these things at the southern invasion front and hopefully we're learning something for that for that northern one. so i actually kind of wanted to follow up on that because interestingly, burmese pythons are threatened in their native range. they're from southeast asia. they are threatened habitat loss in particular in native range. why aren't we pleased that they're actually doing well in florida like they came to florida and you know shouldn't

we be happy you know there are other well not happy but content i mean, you know there are other species that they made it anywhere we'd absolutely cheering right but we're not and what i found really fascinating is, you know, your own work with pythons is to save a rat and a mouse, which don't give me rational rat and mouse. they are extremely cute. it is not their fault. are we trading one pest for another? but just really interesting because those are animals that you would otherwise can some people might consider right? sure. and snake that is threatened in its home range that is succeeding elsewhere. right. right. i think this is a this is an interesting kind of moral ethical question teetering on that edge where the. yeah it's really unfortunate

that burmese pythons are threatened endangered in their native range. and you know in a perfect world we could start collecting in florida and shipping them back, reintroducing them. right. i did ask a scientist why we couldn't try that. right. but they're all they're you know, they're they've breeding in the everglades and presumably adapting hyper specific lee to that environment and shifting a, you know, largely aquatic ecosystem, largely aquatic diet. they've shifted their diets you know, who knows what genetic potential is because. it's unclear they were they were, you know, founded a small population of of released pets and and then who knows kind of diseases that they've been exposed to in their in their, you know, invasive range and that they could potentially bring back and, you know, basically out the the native

range or something like that. i think this you know, we whatever plenty other species that are more common in their invasive ranges camels in the outback are are you know they basically don't exist anymore in the wild they're but they're pretty well i don't know that they're abundant but they're they exist throughout the outback pretty abundant. right. pablo escobar's hippos. how about those hippos. yeah. hippos, camels, horses. yeah. horses. yep. yeah. all of the wild mustangs of the plains. not wild? no pigeons. you know, they're succeeding wildly. there is only one known colony, wild pigeons left in world off the coast of israel. yeah, there's another colony. that's debatable on the north coast of scotland. i don't believe it. sorry. well if he's watching.

and so what's what's the rat connection to the. to the pythons? like you said, are some parts of the everglades where there's just no mammals. i know that you've studied specific species of rats in florida. is there connection between like the fieldwork you've been doing, the rats that you study? yeah there is the cats. oh, yes, it's cats the connection to cats. well, it's it's working in south florida. has charms and i effectively work an interconnected web of pests because i study these endangered rodents the keylogger would track which are not which are not pests they're eco system engineers they're doing all kinds of important seed dispersal ecosystem functions. they're great they live in the forest. they're not coming out into people's homes. they're doing their thing.

they build giant cool nests. yeah. you showed you some other great. yeah. this high but then we have the non-native rats, the invasive black rats. we have had a long running history with feral and roaming cats, domestic as an issue, consuming endangered rodents. and then now we have the pythons and actually we have coyotes, too. so it's all it's all the pest. recently invading guys recently invading. they had to come over 18 miles of bridges and berms to get to the keys. oh, please. night's walk. they got this. but you actually we talked about this you actually successfully manage aged the cat population of key largo. well i did i do it. you know, i've been aided people documented some of it and follow along and it's it's it's fun working there. you know, i've been working there for ten years now, decade

feels like it's to move on to something else i guess. but everybody loves florida. come on. no, but you know the fish and wildlife service has been working in the community to to mitigate the impacts of feral and free roaming cats live, trapping them and, you know, working in the community to remind people responsible pet ownership is ultimately the way to mitigate these issues. right. but what's the one factor that led to more responsible pet ownership than anything else that coyotes and burmese pythons, the common entity, all of a sudden, all of a sudden wanted the help of the biologists and how exactly are they doing that? what's how exactly how how are they helping the biologists? oh well, you know, we get support from community because they're interested in this common common enemy, the burmese pythons. right. so it's because the coyotes were eating the cats.

yeah. pythons. pythons, absolutely consuming cats. they're i mean, they're they consume any mammals that they can find subjugate but anecdotally this is a little bit of scientific gossip here, but we find a lot more fat reserves in the pythons that we find around, you know, the urban areas. there are more cats and the environment. i mean, presumably the raccoons and opossums also have higher reserves in places where they're feeding cats. so they could be accumulating in multiple pathways to get those sodium. mcdonald's of. yeah, i love this summer. well i mean if you're putting out cat food right you're you're setting now of course you're going to be tracking the cats that are going to come there. and then the raccoons and the coyotes and the possums and the skunks and the rats. and the rats. right so but you're basically making this giant concentration of mammal. and so when a cold blood animal

comes around sticking his tongue out, trying to find where where the warm blooded mammals. they're going to go there. and you can just sit and wait. yeah, that's one of the things i found really fascinating reporting book is how people want to feed things. they want to feed animals specifically. they want to have i call it the disney princess moment of the bird landing on your hand. you know, they want to have the deer eat out of your hand and they don't. they want to feed birds. they want to feed, you know, cats. they want and they only want that once they put out a dish of food. and they honestly believe only the one species they want is going to eat it when like if you leave a box of cookies out on the counter and you have a family, do you honestly expect that box of oreos to be when you come back? no, of course not.

like you may have intended it for you, but your dog had other ideas. and i think it's super interesting how like it's generally like the smaller the critter and less pests like they are. right. so yeah. feed the birds. oh, the hummingbirds. what could be like more sort of pure pure, right? and you think you been feeding a hummingbird, the smallest of the right and and then. okay, other birds, like, that's kind of fine, but, you know, if someone starts feeding the raccoon, you're like, oh, you probably shouldn't be. yeah, foxes. someone's feeding the coyotes hey, wait a second. you should be fine. the coyotes so. oh, i see that there's oh yeah. oh wait a second. like as you get bigger that, that like, like all of a sudden, like oh so why is it okay to feed the hummingbirds but not the black bears? and i think, it's, you know, it's because their potential to be a pest and to to be a serious pest, you know, like, has a hummingbird ever been a pest not that i know of, but i'm sure. i'm sure. give it time. i believe in them.

they are small but mighty. no, i was thinking about this because in reporting i in massachusetts i was working with this bear biologist and. he had this huge issue. there was a dude, western massachusetts, who insisted on feeding the bears and he had a big old platform set up in his backyard and bear youtube channel, probably tik tok, to be honest. yeah, but the bears would come every day and he put up this crazy amount of food and he would not stop feeding the bears. he would not stop even the bear biologist came to him and said hey, in an effort to get to your there are bears getting killed on the highway outside this neighborhood because they are trying to get to where you're them. and he's like, well, that's none of my business. just want to feed the bears right? okay yeah. well, but i also think it's this habituation and external resources are creating the pests. right. and so that's again, you know, mr., you know, individual mismanage of resources in terms of, you know, intentional food

supplementation, but there's plenty of other simple things like, securing trash and, and you know, other, other things like that to prevent animals from getting into messes that they can create. but the putting the stuff there is not, you know, what drives it. it's the habitual and the the acceptance until all of a sudden it's no acceptable, right? it's like everybody wants to start and then all a sudden it's too much. yeah, yeah, yeah. no, that's absolutely true. everybody seems to want the photos until it's too much. and that's one of the things i was kind of looking into, is the fact that humans have this idea we end by we i mean western mostly white, you know, kind of groups have this idea that we dominate the environment we deserve to have only the animals that we want be there right and we refuse to change our own behavior when those cause

problems. right. if the animal is into our trash, it is not we who should lock up the trash. it is we who should the animal. there's actually another solution to this. and it's really interesting because i found that this is a very western or a global north or you know and not everyone thinks this way. you know, there are other groups who will say, okay, we need to change our own behavior. we need recognize that these animals are here and we live them and we need to live with them. response and i thought you that's something we could all probably learn from honestly. in other news, please lock up your trash. what i think it's also interesting in your book how you talk about there are situations where just a few people can create pets and the pigeons the pigeons the one example where like if there are hitting feeders that are feeding the pigeons and and the whole population in the city might dependent on it. and a couple that are doing it

for, you know, their own reasons. and i think we see the same thing cat sometimes. well. oh, absolutely. a hawker kind of animal horror kind of situation. and that was actually really interesting because one of the things that i found about pests that they can be a problem of social justice because many of the people who i who i talk to who studied actually the social science pigeon feeding. there are people in this world who this god bless academia love you that yes, his name is colin. jarrod mackey's. nyu wrote a whole book on it. loved it. fantastic. a-plus research. very good. anyway, should have known it'd be in new york, of course, but he talked to people who fed pigeons and he actually looked at why they did. they were lonely. many of these people were elderly. they were alone. they had they had no friends. what else are they going to do? it is a harmless thing to feed the birds and. the birds are grateful and the birds are birds in new york city

are so tame. you can literally reach down and pick one up. i have done it. so it's you do understand why? then you also start to understand this is a social justice issue, right? like we could help people who are elderly and socially isolated be less socially isolated. we could give them a community. people who feed cats, often very socially isolated. we could take care of that. people who live with do so because. they have no choice and they are living in poverty and with homes that are not impervious to rodents, we could fix those problems, right? animals that become pests often becoming pests because our social contracts have failed them. and i think that's a really important to keep in mind when we look at an animal and be like this rat with wings. yeah, absolutely. that's quite powerful. thanks. but or just like to put it together just before we got to

the social contract, we were talking about how there's some threshold we eventually get to an animal and then it becomes a pest and go from being okay with it to then it to to being okay and then blaming that because we can't look at ourselves. it's not our fault. it has to be something else's fault and that that extends to our neighbors as well sometimes times that it's all of a sudden the problem it's not our anymore we're going to blame some other some other type of person or some of some other behavior. yeah, absolutely. that absolutely happens with rats and some of the reporting i did was actually in homeless encampments where people are living with of rats that were excessive. it was a lot and they did not want that. i mean, first of all, they don't want to be homeless. we'll start there, but they also

really don't want to live rats. they did not want to live in environment that was dirty. you could actually see we know places where they were like organized and keeping spaces clean. they were doing their best. it was the social contract that failed them of like it was a society that had decided they did not deserve clean housing and to be free of living with animals. i think that's a really important thing to think about. now. thank i'm sorry. i mean, to get dark. no, think that's a fantastic place to maybe see what some of the if there's anyone who's here in the theater us that has any thoughts questions they'd like to share can just wave at me. i'll actually i'm going to bring you a microphone but. i think it's a great spot to leave it as a reflection. right. that's like a that's a good

moment. well, while you run down there, can mike tell the story of the python and pants? oh, my gosh. simply it's you know, you're to you're supposed to leave that for a secret. oh, you'll have to read chapter two of pest. everybody such a good. i. december 2007. i guess i was i in a former life before curatorial duties here at the north carolina museum of natural sciences. i was a zookeeper at the palm beach zoo in 2007, and i backcountry camping in the everglades by myself and it was right after hurricane wilma a lot of the trails been cleared and i needed a permit to go you know backcountry camping whatever and i went i went solo and there was an 11 or 12 mile hike and i was i don't six or

seven miles in and and i found this burmese python like this beautiful. and i looked at it and i admired it along the trail stuff. and it's like, wow, that's why i hold you because it doesn't belong here. and this is before it was kind of well known. yeah. 2007 was like really early in this you know before they really knew a lot about them. so you knew you had to catch it. i started walking. i started, i kept going and then i was like, wait a second, i've got to catch this thing. and so turned back and i, you know, didn't really have a plan. i just grabbed it by the tail. and, you know, i grew up in the era of the steve irwin days, right? i was like, oh, okay. and i had no actual i grabbed had it by the tail i threw my i took my shirt off. i threw my shirt over the head because, you know, a simple is that if you cover an animal's, they'll be easy to capture and. so i grabbed it by the head and

then and then its body and then its wrapped all around me right. and so then i, you know, i was hopped up on adrenaline at that point. and i was like, okay, now what? you know, and this was don't know. i, i, i'm sure like the coyotes and everything. i'll elaborate. it was probably 30 feet. this snake, i think i said it was smaller in the book. i, you said it was 13 feet and then you looked up the email evidence and it was eight anyway. great. it was very probably 25 feet like the strength of a 13 foot four. if it was inch anyway, a long story short, i'm an eagle scout. i am resourceful. i took my pants off my jeans, one handed, one handed and i tied legs of each of them with my teeth. and then i slowly unravel the snake and stuffed it into my pants and put a bungee cord through the belt loop and cinched it, shut and threw the snake in my pants in my backpack

and slept with it in my tent with me. that night. and then on the out the next morning i three additional burmese pythons. so i was like, holy smokes, must be a way bigger deal than anyone realizes. and when i got back to check out for my backcountry permit, i said, hey, you know this. you up in your underwear? yeah. and i walked, i said, you know, are are people finding burmese pythons, the everglades and the woman that i had to check out with the permit or she's like, i got a better question where. are your pants? and i said, and i said, they're right over there on the sidewalk. there's a python in. and anyway, that's kind of kind of proud of you. yeah, it was before the days of, you know, camera and everything. i have zero document nation of that other than the national park service came collected that

snake was early on in the research and put a transmitter it and rereleased that as part of their initial study studying the behavior of burmese python you sent an email to a friend in which you described the encounter. yeah. and then you sent it to me because of fact checking and then yeah, i was like, i've been the grows every year since 2007. so anyway thank you. and now i'm back in the florida keys studying pythons again. can't escape the pests. i'm glad we got that story. i'm going to have you tell that story a lot. bethany looking at the cover of your book. i see. i was trying understand the range like the pests that are the biggest pests in my life are insects and i didn't know what you live in i see at first i saw only mammals, including what looks like a squirrel, perhaps your squirrel.

but now we've talked about reptiles and birds did you is that full? how did you decide what to or not cover as pests. yeah. the book is actually only vertebrates. certainly i time you talk about pest. i have a list. as long my arm even of vertebrates that did not make it. there are many seagulls crows wild hogs. oh, pugs, tigers, giant snails. i mean, there's just so many i ended up actually focusing on vertebrates for a reason because this was about the subjective nature of pests, because reality is, even if it's a pest on an aggregate cultural crop that we value, that is still a subjective judgment. but can't really get people to make an emotional connection to an aphid or a it just doesn't it's hard. snakes hard enough. so i ended up focusing on invertebrates because.

i really wanted people to feel the tension and to feel the subject liveness of the definition and to kind realize that these are definitions that impose on the animals and don't have anything to do with the animals themselves. right? no animal, invertebrate, insect or otherwise is is deliberately going out to cause trouble. they're merely taking advantage opportunities that we provide. yeah. so i know that with insects and i don't know if this is also true with vertebrates that if an insect does it as a pest, then changes the way that it's regulated and, you know, legal things are. i mean, is that true with vertebrates? and then so then how does a pest get classified as a pest in that regard in of like how it's going to be dealt with in public

policy or regulatory? i'm throwing that one to roland. you know, that. jeez, i was going to talk to you. well, i only know that in australia. yeah. so i was thinking about the rabbits in australia. yes. so generally with, with with the vertebrate sort of what you're allowed to, to an animal is dependent on the sort of the game agency. right. they're going to regulate. you can hunt deer what the seasons, what the ways that you can hunt them and they're going to have classify different species according to that and so that gets most interesting i think, in some of these areas when it comes to what to feral hogs because sometimes if they classify them as a game that's different than if they classify them as a as more of a pest. and so if they're a pest, then they'll open up more, you know, any time open season, no bag limit, you know, more liberal in terms of what types of methods you can use to harvest them. and so generally speaking with vertebrates, you know, invasive

are usually sort of you can do whatever you want because they're invasive, open but it's not quite the same with agriculture because most of the vertebrates don't get classified the same way that invertebrates do. you do have often and when it gets a little is when you have something like a deer that's become a agricultural pest. then do you have the test to follow the rules of the hunting or do you get special pest rules? and so they do have special pest rules. you need to sort of apply and tell the state what the problem is. but usually it's pretty easy to get permission for a farmer to go shoot deer of season kind of as much as they want if they're causing problems. and maybe mike wants to elaborate some on that. yeah, no, i think kind of in line with what had in mind, i think that there's there's no like legal classification of pests as bird vertebrates. pests as far as i understand.

yeah, i'm not sure about that but yeah. terms of like feral hogs in the state of north carolina, there's no harvest regulated an open season. i think important thing is that that there are rules and regulations about how humane the death has to be because, you know, there's not you can't just, you know, throw bombs at them or plant or anything like that or poisons you've to watch out with a poisonous poison that could harm lots other species also like hold traps and snare traps are differently regulated. yeah, sure. yeah, yeah for sure. depending on the species and what what is actually interesting in line with that is that, you know, part of my work in the keys started as you know a follow up to their integrated pest management plan. and the pest management plan includes removing all invasive species, including things feral cats and, you know, that is

where a lot controversy stems from because people have a hard time accepting that animals that can be our pets, whether they're cats or feral dogs, burmese pythons. ortega's can also be invasive, deadly predators in the ecosystems. but what i find most fascinating about that is, you know, as part of the work i've been doing with pythons we we were tracking them and finding pythons because they were consuming some of the prey animals in our research most recently. so i've been fielding a lot of emails from people so yeah but but suggesting you know folks from the general public they have all kinds of ideas about, you know, putting poison pills on the collars, these raccoons and possums or little detonators that as soon a python consumes them, they blow up or spikes

that like expand out. as soon as they hit the the stomach acid of a python. and it's fascinating because people the killing of python, you know, they're like everyone's excited like these python derbies kill all the pythons. there are some coyote derbies to in places. and but and yet a lot of other species feral and free roaming cats, you know that just as destructive in the environment are kind of, uh, you know, it's like, look past that because they're cute or because we affiliate them with associate with being our pets and not predators. and so i think that there's a lot of humanization and that, that the gradient that pests fall on, you know, probably correlate with that, you know,

humanization of them like broadly with the public how much we kind of what's word i'm looking for align with them or anthropomorphize. yeah. anthropomorphize yeah yeah. mean i think that's very that's that i've been thinking about a lot is that we really we will do a great deal to protect the animals we value to the point that we will do really awful things to the animals we don't because we value another animal more and i think about this a lot with regard to, for example island ecosystems, you will have rats or mice that end up on islands usually of us and there's like a population seabirds and it's like this last population of these 100 seabirds or whatever and people will drop millions tons of poison on those islands to rid of those rats. they totally and they will celebrate at the end. they're like, yes we did it. we got rid of the rats. if it is a cat, all of a sudden

or even rabbits or even rabbits, you can't have you considered rehoming it. have you considered? you know, taking it somewhere and adopting it. right. what is the difference. you know. and it also made me ask the question, i don't know if there's a good to this. i've talked to many ethicists and none of them agree, as is traditional with ethicists. and i've asked them like, what is the right decision and why are some of these animals more valuable right? the reality is that the rats are killer more because are pests. they are killer because are common. but why is it bad to be common? why do we privilege the rare mm you know why biodiversity considered an inherent that's not to say i don't think that because i do think that biodiversity is great but it is also a judgment that we've made

and it's kind of one that we have to live with the consequences with which is kind of sad. anyway, in australia you can shoot cat whenever you want by the way, because they're pests there or rabbit bio shotgun. i don't know if you'll have an answer to this one. i kind of watched all this python talk has made me realize there's an elephant. your book and no one in the united states would ever consider an elephant as a pest. but can clearly imagine a situation in other places where they are. but what i have personal experience with is living in austin, texas, where a very large colony of bats lives in a manmade structure in the heart of the city. and yeah go south to mexico for the winters, but always comes back and are consider i mean, the population is sort of we had our people gather around and watch them come at sunset and. i think that is a fraction that is that attracts a attraction.

and so bat city and interesting fact the actor who played eddie munster in austin, texas, also and weirdly but yeah are are bats is one of those flying things on your book a bat are they or not. i actually ended up avoiding in part because covid, it was a sensitive at the time, you know, because some species of bats at bats are really keep an eye on the space regarding bats. um, so that's a really interesting but they're also very interesting in that most the time people don't go out to trap and poison bats right. if they are killed they're killed in retaliation for things like disease outbreaks. so no, the bats are not, but the elephants are yeah, i got to study elephants in kenya i studied african elephants and i met some up close and they're beautiful they're so smart they

so sweet they kill 200 people a year in east africa and caused millions of dollars in crop damage. i sort of was thinking earlier as we were talking about the squirrel example as a pest that they're sort of the funny pest. yeah. you know, it's like lots of people have relationships with them. lots of people are annoyed with them. in the past but it's like, oh, he ate the tomatoes. that's funny, you can call them a funny name, but then there's the elephants, you know, some of the other species in your book that that have like wolves will more right much more consequential pests. i feel like i don't know i feel like we need another gradation of pest. we need like two different words. make minor pest, funny funny pest. and not so funny pest. if you look the work of filipe nyusi, he has published a interesting article on this topic in 2016 where he actually kind of classified animals into like eight cubes of human judgment, which i adore.

so basically it's a three dimensional kind of cube situation. where in your exact this is how common? the encounter is your y axis is, like how severe the encounter is and. like the middle axis is like how positive negative it is right? those could be different axes. it's hard to remember a three dimensional. yeah i don't manipulate objects in my head very well, but very interesting because there are we think of animals where consequences are rare, very severe and those are predators. so like brown bears, sharks, things like that, very rare, very negative. that doesn't turn out well. but then you have encounters that kind of goes on a great ocean where you have encounters that are less severe but more common. so most of the time when people have negative encounters with elephants, it's because they're eating their entire crop for the season, not because they are killing.

if kill it is by accident, usually there have been a couple of cases that are not accident. elephants are smart and then most of the that we think of as pests, you know, mice, rats, pigeons, geese canada geese. yeah. the interactions are extremely common, extremely mild and only slightly negative. right. like people really hate goose poop. what i find really fascinating about that is like every group of canada geese. you see on like a golf course or a lawn. we brought them there because we thought were picturesque and stayed and now we're i love that for it's just it kind of makes me happy. let's give our guests one more round of applause.