Laura Erickson's For the Birds

One of our long-time sponsors of “For the Birds” is Earth Angel, from Earth Angel Bird Emporium. She started out helping people to attract “upscale, trendy birds” to their feeding stations, but became an engineering whiz and came out with “Earth Angel Bird Identification Binoculars” and then “Earth Angel Bird Identification Earrings” way back in the 1990s, long before anyone thought such things were even possible, making her a billionaire. And as billionaires are wont to do, she’s working on a new project. I talked to her just last week.

EARTH ANGEL: Thank you for having me, Laura.

LAURA: I hear you recently made an exciting discovery.

EARTH ANGEL: Yes! I learned that people were banding birds long, long before we thought they were.

LAURA: Americans consider John James Audubon the first bird bander—he tied a silvered thread around the leg of an Eastern Phoebe in 1804, to see if it would return the next year, and it did.

EARTH ANGEL: Yes, but long before that, Ancient Greeks were using pigeons to relay results of the original Olympic Games to participating city-states, and there’s also evidence that pigeons carried messages during Marc Antony’s siege of Mutina in 44 BCE.

LAURA: But using homing pigeons to carry messages isn’t bird banding in the way we use the term now, placing official numbered leg bands on wild birds.

EARTH ANGEL: Well, true, but the extremely old case I’m excited about is about a wild bird—a Horned Lark. It was found in a cave in Siberia, where it had been frozen for 45,000 years. Not coincidentally, Siberia is exactly where the remains of Ust’-Ishim man, one of the early modern humans to inhabit Siberia, was found—and those remains, too, are 45,000 years. Coincidence? I don’t think so. Everyone knows that banders record the date that they capture a bird along with the bird’s species and sex—precisely the information we have about this female Horned Lark. I’m now funding an expedition to examine the cave walls—I’m sure we’ll find written confirmation and maybe even information about other banded birds from long, long ago.

LAURA: But the bird remains were found in northeastern Siberia while Ust’-Ishim man’s remains were found in western Siberia.

EARTH ANGEL: Well, the poor man obviously didn’t die immediately after banding the lark. People move around, you know.

LAURA: According to the paper in Communications Biology, scientists used carbon dating to establish when the bird died in the cave, and reconstructed its complete mitochondrial genome to establish that it’s very closely related to today’s Horned Larks.

EARTH ANGEL: That’s what they said, but how do you think they got the idea to check it out? There’s gotta be writing on the wall.

LAURA: I think the only writing on caves back then was simple drawings, and that the oldest known depiction of a bird on a cave wall was in Chauvet, France, from about 32,000 years ago.

EARTH ANGEL: Yes—that IS the oldest KNOWN bird information recorded on a cave wall. Records are made to be broken, and my expedition will be record-setting in many ways.

LAURA: Well, all I can say is good luck. But by the way, now that so many people are using the Cornell App, “Merlin,” to identify bird photos and bird calls in nature, is Cornell paying you royalties? Your Earth Angel Bird Identification Earrings with the tiny parabolas really were ahead of their time.

EARTH ANGEL: I should have patented them, but at least Merlin didn’t steal the earrings concept—to use it, you have to lug around a cellphone. But if you can believe it, Swarovski is now selling binoculars that are almost identical to the Earth Angel Bird Identification Binoculars I came out with in the 1990s. They don’t talk about the teenie, tiny microchip embedded in the binocular housing, and don’t give the same guarantee I did—that they’ll accurately identify the birds you see in 12 seconds flat or your money back. I guess they were worried a little about trademark issues—they also call them Smart Binoculars rather than Bird Identification Binoculars. But oh, well—I should have patented them, too.

LAURA: Well, thanks for the update. We’ll be sure to have you back on the program when you get proof that primitive humans were banding birds 45,000 years ago. Now a word from our other sponsor.

JIM BAKER: This is me, Jim Baker, the one and only proprietor of Baker’s Blue Jay Barn. Everyone knows that ever since I started selling Baker’s Blue Jay Blend in 1987, it’s been the best food blend you can buy anywhere—the right choice for nature’s perfect bird. My recipe was perfect from the start, including peanuts, egg yolk, sunflower seed hearts, fried insects from my bug zapper, and ground-up baby chicks, and when I lost a stupid bet with Martha Stewart in 1997, I started adding raisins to the mix.

But from the start, I’ve wanted to include a special kind of berry and seed that is wonderfully nutritious and tasty for birds, from a wonderful if maligned native plant. No one else sells this ingredient because stupid OSHA, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Federal Bureau of Consumer Protection can be so hypervigilant about every little thing affecting workers and consumers.

Now, co-President Elon Musk and his DOGE boys are paving the way for me to add Toxicodendron seeds and berries to Baker’s Blue Jay Blend. Yep. A few customers may get a little rash from touching the new formula, but as Elon Musk said when talking about the possibility that SpaceX crashes and explosions and debris could kill a whale, they “had it coming.” Of course, this plant also called poison ivy, but no one needs to know that—I’ll just call it my “Patented New Ingredient” and everyone will be happy—especially me because right now there’s so much poison ivy growing in my woods that I can’t wear shorts even when it’s hot. Not that climate change is real. heh.

So head up to my feed store for my New, Improved Baker’s Blue Jay Blend, with my secret Patented New Ingredient, available only at Baker’s Blue Jay Barn, “up the shore a ways.”

EARTH ANGEL: That was Jim Baker, I’m Earth Angel,

LAURA: And I’m Laura Erickson, and this April Fools Day program has been For the Birds.