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Thanks to Liesbet, Simon, and Thea for their suggestions this week! Let's learn about some birds!\n\nFurther reading:\n\nBlue Tits and Milk Bottle Tops\n\nRavens parallel great apes in flexible planning for tool-use and bartering\n\nFurther watching:\n\nA Raven Calling [this is a great video of a raven making all sorts of interesting sounds--I only used a tiny clip of it in the episode but it's worth watching the whole thing]\n\nThe European robin:\n\n\n\nThe American robin and a worm that is having a very bad day:\n\n\n\nA blue tit [photo By \xa9 Francis C. Franklin / CC-BY-SA-3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37675470]:\n\n\n\nA blue tit about to get the cap off that milk bottle [photo from link above]:\n\n\n\nThe Eastern bluebird:\n\n\n\nA raven:\n\n \n\nAn American crow:\n\n\n\nShow transcript:\n\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.\n\nThis week we have suggestions from Liesbet, Simon, and Thea, who suggested some relatively common birds that you may already think you know all about, but there\u2019s lots to learn about them!\n\nWe\u2019ll start with Liesbet\u2019s suggestion, about the European robin and bluebird, and while we\u2019re at it we\u2019ll learn about the American robin and bluebird. The European and American birds are completely different species. The reason they have the same names is because when Europeans first started paying attention to the birds of North America, they needed names for the birds. The native peoples had names for them, of course, but the Europeans wanted names in a language they understood, so in a lot of cases they just borrowed names already in use at home.\n\nLet\u2019s start with the robin, which we also talked about way back in episode 81.\n\nThe European robin is a little bitty bird, only around 5 inches long, or 13 cm, with a brown back, streaked gray or buff belly, and orange face and breast. It has a short black bill and round black eyes. It eats insects, worms, berries, and seeds. The eggs are pale brown with reddish speckles.\n\nIt lives throughout much of Eurasia, but robins in Britain tend to be fairly tame, probably because they were traditionally considered beneficial in Britain and Ireland, so farmers and gardeners wouldn\u2019t hurt them. In other parts of Europe they were hunted and are much more shy. European robins are also common on Christmas cards in Britain and Ireland, possibly because in the olden days, postmen used to wear red jackets. The postmen started to be called robins as a result, and since postmen bring Christmas cards, the bird robin became linked with card delivery and finally just ended up on the Christmas cards. Plus, their orange markings are cheerful in winter.\n\nThis is what the European robin sounds like:\n\n[robin song]\n\nThe American robin is a type of thrush. It lives year-round in most of the United States and parts of Mexico, spends summers in much of Canada, and winters in parts of Mexico. It\u2019s very different from the European robin. The European robin is tiny and round and adorable, while the American robin is big and always looks kind of angry. It grows around 10 inches long, or 25 cm. It\u2019s dark gray on its back, with a rusty red breast, white undertail coverts, and a long yellow bill. It also has white markings around its eyes. Young birds are speckled. It mostly eats insects, worms, and berries.\n\nIf you see a bird on the ground, running quickly and then stopping, it\u2019s probably a robin. Mostly the robin hunts bugs by sight, but it has good hearing and can actually hear worms moving around underground. You can sometimes see a robin with its head cocked, listening for a worm, before pouncing and pulling it out of the ground, just like in a cartoon.\n\nAmerican robin eggs are a light teal blue, so common and well-known that robin\u2019s-egg-blue is a typical description of that particular color. In the spring after eggs hatch, the mother robin will carry the eggshells away from the nest to drop them,