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b'Pre-order your tiny pin friend via our Indiegogo campaign!\\n\\nThis week we talk about some springtime animals! Sort of! Thanks to Derek and Nikita for their suggestions!\\n\\nHappy birthday to Lillian, Hannah, and Derek! What a busy birthday week! Everybody gets cake!\\n\\nFurther reading:\\n\\nTales from Tennessee\\n\\nThere\'s more than one way to grow a beak\\n\\nA male river chub. "It\'s not funny guys, put me down guys" (photo by Bill Hubick):\\n\\n\\n\\nBusy busy busy building a big big nest (photo from site linked to above):\\n\\n\\n\\nGot a rock (photo from site linked to above):\\n\\n\\n\\nOne bilby:\\n\\n\\n\\nTwo bilbies:\\n\\n\\n\\nEaster bilbies not bunnies:\\n\\n\\n\\nEgg tooth:\\n\\n\\n\\nThe red jungle fowl is the wild ancestor of the domestic chicken:\\n\\n\\n\\nModern domestic chickens:\\n\\n\\n\\nShow transcript:\\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.\\nIt\\u2019s springtime in the northern hemisphere, with spring festivals like Easter coming up fast. This week let\\u2019s look at three animals that represent springtime, sort of. Thanks to Derek and Nikita for suggesting two of the animals we\\u2019ll learn about this week!\\nBefore we start, though, two things! One, I\\u2019m running a little crowdfunding campaign to have some enamel pins made. I won\\u2019t spam you about it like our big Kickstarter for the book last fall, but there will be a link in the show notes if you want to take a look. There are three designs, a narwhal, a capybara with a tangerine on its head, and a not-terribly-accurate thylacine. The campaign is called Tiny Pin Friends and it\\u2019s on Indiegogo.\\nhttps://www.indiegogo.com/projects/tiny-pin-friends/x/2964999#/\\nTwo, it\\u2019s birthday shout-out time! This week we have not one, not two, but THREE birthday shout-outs! You know what that means, of course. It means we all need to be celebrating all week! A great big happy birthday to Lillian, Hannah, and Derek! And yes, birthday Derek is the same Derek who suggested one of the animals this week!\\nIn fact, let\\u2019s start with his suggestion, a fish called the river chub. It\\u2019s a little fish that only grows a little over a foot long at most, or 33 cm, although it\\u2019s usually much smaller than that. It\\u2019s common in fast-moving streams and rivers throughout North America, especially in the Appalachian Mountains and surrounding areas.\\nThe river chub isn\\u2019t all that exciting to look at, unless of course you\\u2019re a fish enthusiast or a river chub yourself. It\\u2019s greenish-silver above and pale underneath with orange fins. Males are larger than females and during breeding season, in late spring, the male turns purplish-red, his head enlarges, and he develops tubercles on the front part of his head that look sort of like white rhinestones.\\nHis physical changes aren\\u2019t just to attract a mate. The male river chub builds a pebble nest by picking up little stones and moving them to just the right spots, so by having a more robust head and broad mouth, he can pick up bigger stones. And he picks up a LOT of stones, as many as 10,000 of them, which he arranges and rearranges.\\nFemales are attracted to well-made nests. After a female lays her eggs in the nest, the male fertilizes the eggs and then spends the next week or so defending them by head-butting other males and potential predators, until the eggs hatch into larvae.\\nThe pebble nests help other animals too. Over 30 species of fish use the nests as spawning sites once the river chub\\u2019s eggs hatch. Good job, river chub, helping out all those other fish!\\nNext, a while back Nikita suggested we learn about the bilby. It\\u2019s not springtime right now in Australia where the bilby lives, but the Christian holiday of Easter is still celebrated at the same time as it is in the northern hemisphere. Instead of chocolate Easter bunnies, in Australia they also have chocolate Easter bilbies.\\nIn 1968, a nine-year-old girl named Rose-Marie Dusting wrote a story called \\u201cBilly the Aussie Easter Bilby.\\u201d When she grew up, Rose-Marie published the story as a picture book,'