This episode is for the birds — and one bird in particular. Flaco, an Eurasian eagle-owl, escaped from the Central Park Zoo last year and went on to become a local celebrity, delighting New Yorkers with his feathered adventures across Manhattan. Late last month, however, Flaco died after an apparent collision with a building. Obviously, Flaco's death is a sad event for many reasons, but it got us thinking about the role of birds in the wider world. Not only are they an important part of the natural ecosystem, but they can also contribute to agriculture (or quality of life in the city) by eating bugs, rats and other pests. So can you put an exact dollar amount on the value of a bird and what it does for the world? It turns out that for many decades, some economists were devoted to exactly this question. In this episode, we speak with Robert Francis, the author of the Bird History Substack, about the largely forgotten science of economic ornithology and historic attempts to figure out exactly how much a bird is worth. This episode has been lightly edited for clarity.
Key insights from the pod:
What is economic ornithology? — 5:37
How to study the economic value of birds — 7:14
Putting a net dollar value on birds — 8:50
Methodological limitations — 15:54
The impact of pesticides — 17:21
Conservation and valuing wildlife — 24:04
Pricing bird protection — 27:19
What kills birds — 28:20
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Tracy Alloway (00:20):
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.
Joe Weisenthal (00:25):
And I'm Joe Weisenthal.
Tracy (00:26):
Joe, did you hear the sad news?
Joe (00:29):
Yes, I know the sad news you are talking about. I have to say, I was a little surprised to get a push alert that an owl had died. I know for some people it was a really big deal.
Tracy (00:42):
That is such shade, that is such shade against Flaco of the owl. I can't believe you're saying that.
Joe (00:46):
I'm trying to be diplomatic. Some people seem to be really torn up. I was like, I'm a little surprised that the death of an owl made it to a push alert. But nonetheless, yes, I know where you're going with this.
Tracy (00:59):
Okay, so for those people who don't know, maybe they don't follow local New York news as much, maybe they're just heartless New Yorkers like Joe, they don't care about the animals. Flaco the Owl, died recently. We're recording this on February 27th. He died over the weekend. Apparently, he flew into a building, although we're still waiting for the toxicology report, I think.
But the reason everyone was so interested in the fate and fortunes of this owl is because he was actually a Eurasian eagle owl who had escaped from the zoo. Although, actually I think vandals basically broke into his exhibit and let him out. And he's been flying around the city ever since. He was sort of a symbol of survivalism in the urban jungle. People didn't expect him to be able to make it.
Joe (01:50):
Yeah. And so, there were a bunch of spottings right? In Central Park and elsewhere.
Tracy (01:54):
Yeah. There are photos of him. He would perch on air conditioners and sort of peek into people's windows at odd times of the day and night.
Joe (02:02):
It is kind of wild that in a city this big, a single bird could just be spotted all over the place for the wild and people would know, ‘Oh, this is that bird,’ that's pretty cool.
Tracy (02:12):
Well, he stood out, right? He's not native — again, the clue is in the name, Eurasian eagle owl — but I have to ask, how much do you think an owl like Flaco is worth?
Joe (02:21):
That's a good question. I don't know, how much would it cost if I wanted to acquire one? Are you thinking that? On the open market?
Tracy (02:34):
Yeah, this kind of gets into the issue, right? What would the basis of that valuation actually be? So you can imagine there's probably a market price that zoos or even black market collectors would pay for an Eurasian eagle owl. There's probably a replacement value for insurance for a viable male that could produce chicks.
But maybe Flaco has value in other ways. So people were clearly happy to see him flying around the city. We know that he was eating rats at certain points. So maybe he was valuable as someone killing rats and other pests. But on the other hand, what if he ate someone's backyard chicken, then would he have negative value? He's destroying public property, or private property. What if it was a Buff Orpington, a really nice show Orpington, and now someone has to replace their fancy chicken? I have a lot of thoughts on this, Joe, I'm sorry to regale you with them at nine in the morning.
Joe (03:33):
Look, clearly the death of Flaco meant more to you than me, but just objectively listening to you, there's some really interesting questions here that I just would never have thought about at all in terms of the connection between the dollar value — there is some economic value associated with a bird that people love that is rare, that would've been difficult for a zoo to acquire that would be difficult for a zoo to secure. There's a cost to, as you said, the insurance. So interesting questions that I certainly never once thought about up until one minute ago in my life.
Tracy (04:08):
You know what, Joe? We don't even have to speculate about this.
Joe (04:13):
Okay. We don't have to. Why? Do we have the answer?
Tracy (04:14):
Well, it turns out there is actually a whole body of economics that deals with exactly this topic. It is economic ornithology.
Joe (04:22):
Can I just say something, Tracy? I think you're more interested in this topic than any other episode we've done in about a year.
Tracy (04:28):
This is my revenge for the Celsius episodes, where not only do I have to talk about Celsius for 30 minutes, but I also have to drink it while we're talking. I should have brought in a bird for us to look at while we're here. No, okay, economic ornithology. So the idea here is to actually attach an estimated value to birds and their role in the ecosystem of eating bugs and rodents and other things that might be considered pests, either in New York City or in farmland and the agricultural industry. So this is a thing that exists and I think we should talk about it.
Joe (05:06):
Let's do it.
Tracy (05:06):
Okay. I'm very, very happy — Joe, less so — I'm happy to say we do in fact have the perfect guest. We're going to be speaking with Robert Francis. He is the author of the Bird History Substack and he wrote a really great piece about economic ornithology. So, Robert, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots.
Robert (05:26):
Thanks for having me.
Tracy (05:27):
Joe clearly is a little incredulous that this is something that exists. How did you start writing about economic ornithology? How did you discover this topic?
Robert (05:37):
Sure. So I'm working on a book about how the relationship between birds and people has changed over the course of America's history. And when you're looking at the progressive era, so from the 1890s to the 1930s, you really can't miss the way that people talk about birds in economic terms.
They talk about birds in their relation to agriculture. And as friends to farmers, as playing a really important role in protecting crops from agricultural pests, and this isn't just farmers talking about it. You read people talking about birds like this in the Saturday Evening Post, in Harper's Weekly. You hear sportsmen talking about it. You read in school manuals that children are getting problems about how to calculate how many destructive bugs each individual bird might eat over the course of several months.
So it's really something that throughout society, people are thinking about birds in this way. And the force behind this is a government bureau called the Bureau of Biological Survey that was established in 1885 to study this question to help farmers understand how they should feel about birds and what the impact of birds are or could be on their crops.
Joe (06:53):
So, alright, this is already fascinating. I didn't know that there was a Bureau of Biological survey, but that is really cool. You mentioned children's problems about okay, how many bugs a bird would eat. What are some of the other ways, when you talk about this language of talking of birds and economic language, what do we talk about? What does it sound like ? How are they describing these birds?
Robert (07:14):
Sure. So they're talking about birds as protecting crops from destructive bugs. They're talking about hawks and eagles and owls protecting crops from mice and rats and other things [that] might eat grain or might affect the orchards or things that. And it's really looking at birds at an individual level.
Their main way that they study birds and their impact on crops is by cutting open their stomachs and counting how many bugs of each different species, how many little broken up pieces of bugs that they find in their stomachs. And comparing that to how many seeds from wheat that they might find, little pieces of apples that they see and comparing it and saying ‘What are they doing that's helpful? How many destructive bugs are they eating? How many harmful bugs are they eating compared to how many helpful things to the farmer are they eating? And where's the balance? Where does the balance lie? Are they more helpful to farmers or are they more harmful?’
Tracy (08:12):
So birds can be good or bad for crops. They can eat your strawberries, and I speak from personal experience here. But they can also eat the Japanese beetles on your rose bushes. And again, I'm speaking from personal experience and Japanese beetles are my arch enemy now.
But anyway, how do you come up with the net calculation for something like that and how precise can you get with that? Can you get it all the way down to dollars and cents? So this robin is worth $853 to me in terms of crop protection every year?
Robert (08:50):
Yeah. And the economic ornithologists of this period certainly tried and you look at the figures that they put out, and it makes it seem very, very precise. And so a calculation might be, okay, so a mouse might eat 2 cents of grain over the course of a year and a single hawk based on how many mice they find in a dissected hawk stomach. A single hawk might eat a thousand mice over the course of a year. So, you do that arithmetic and you see that this hawk saves a farmer $20 worth of grain.
Of course, the same hawk might also eat six chickens over the course of a year. And each chicken might be worth 50 cents to a farmer. So it does $20 worth of benefit to the farmer and $3 worth of harm. So this hawk, according to these economic ornithologists, they would tell farmers, this hawk is worth $17 to you.
And the reason that they were sharing this information is to try to affect farmers' behaviors. They're trying to get farmers to stop killing these hawks. So they would tell a farmer, you might save yourself $3 by killing this hawk that occasionally eats your chickens, but you're actually costing yourself $20 in lost grain.
Joe (10:05):
So basically, a hawk eating a chicken is a very visible thing. Like, the hawk ate my chicken, I mean [it’s] almost Econ 101, the seen, the unseen a little bit. But it’s like, probably the hawk eating the mouse which would [eat] the grain is just not something that would be as front of mind for them?
Robert (10:27):
Yep, exactly. And so, this bureau that was established in 1885 is looking at all of these birds that have these reputations as pests; crows that will eat your corn, robins that will peck your apples. And that farmers had traditionally killed, and they were trying to act almost like judges on behalf of these birds and look at all of them and say ‘Okay, for each of these birds that farmers complain about, are these birds actually more helpful or harmful?”
And in almost every case, they came back and said, even these birds like a crow that people have traditionally thought of as pests, they actually have a net positive impact on agriculture by eating harmful bugs by eating mice and that impact is greater than the harm that they cause by opening up the occasional ear of corn.
Tracy (11:32):
So you touched on this earlier, the idea of kids in school rooms maybe trying to do these calculations, but talk to us a little bit more about how widespread this knowledge was. So if I was a farmer in Iowa in the early 1900s and I was sat on my front porch watching sparrows eat my grain, would I be sat there thinking ‘it's okay, they're also eating some weed seeds and some harmful bugs, so that's all good.’ How much was this embedded in the popular consciousness at the time?
Robert (12:07):
You know, at the end of the 1800s, I would say not very much. Again, there was this tradition, there were a lot of states, for example, that offered bounties for crows, for sparrows, for birds that were perceived as harmful. So states would pay farmers to kill crows, they’d sometimes pay farmers to kill hawks. So, you know, it was pretty well accepted that there were some birds that were harmful for crops and it was better for everyone if we killed them.
As this bureau went, over time, pushing out information about the positive impact that birds had on agriculture, and it became much more accepted and much more popular to think of birds as helpful to agriculture. You saw the end of these bounty laws, you saw these publications that I referenced in the Saturday Evening Post and in like popular magazines talking about the importance of birds, right?
You also had publications in something called the Farmer's Bulletin that went out to farmers that they could read, to learn about how to improve their crop yields and, you know, alongside articles about best practices with planting and tilling, you had these articles about building birdhouses to attract certain kinds of birds.
Joe (13:16):
Something about economics, the phenomenon, is economists sometimes arrive at conclusions about things that feel intuitively wrong. In fact, often economists love that about themselves, like ‘You think this is good for the economy, but actually you're really harming it.’ And I have to wonder, so I'm looking at your substack and there's this picture of an economic ornithologist, and they seem to be wearing three piece suits, and these very fancy silk ties in the photo. And I wonder if the farmers out in the middle of the country, you know, they have these notions ‘Oh, this bird's good…’
Tracy (13:50):
They're like grumbling about the economists in their white towers of ornithology?
Joe (13:55):
Yeah! Exactly that. And then the economists in their three piece suits are like ‘Well, actually this bird is good for you.’ And I’m curious if like, today people don't like hearing from economists often because economists say ‘This is actually good for you and you thought it was bad.’ And you’re like ‘I know. I don't need to listen to you. I know what’s good and bad.’ I'm curious if that sort of culture clash was evident even back then, if these economists from the bureau came trying to tell farmers what they should and shouldn't kill.
Robert (14:21):
Totally. And, you know, I haven't seen instances where there was that conflict, but in a lot of cases they were fighting an uphill battle. I think there were certainly a lot of farmers that adopted some of these practices and you saw a decrease in the number of hawks that were killed. But at the same time, while most birds received federal protection in 1918, some hawks and some owls didn't receive the same level of production until the 70s.
Throughout this entire time, there were still a lot of farmers that would keep killing the birds that they saw eating their crops. And some of this tension still exists today, like there's still a lot of birds that are considered by farmers and by the Department of Agriculture, they're still considered pests. This idea that birds can be harmful to crops and are sometimes harmful to crops has not completely disappeared.
Tracy (15:07):
So on that note, I know the book you're working on is primarily focused on the relationship between birds and people in America, but maybe it might be helpful to contrast it with the most famous example of people getting the economic value of birds wrong, which is what happened in China under the Four Pests campaign where people were encouraged to go out and kill a bunch of different pests, sparrows included, and then it backfired horribly and you got a bunch more insects — I think it was mostly locusts — and then a lot fewer crops, and then a great famine in the late 50s, early 60s. But I think when people think about the economic or agricultural value of birds, that's probably one of the prime examples that springs to mind?
Robert (15:54):
Sure. And I think we haven't seen something like that in the United States in recent years. So I would say that isn't so much top of mind, but you can look at more recent research that's come out about the impact of birds on crops. And, you know, we can maybe talk in a moment about some of the methodological limitations of these progressive era economic ornithologists, but more recent research that makes use of things like randomized controlled trials and takes a more ecological approach has shown pretty convincingly that birds have a very positive impact on agriculture and that, you know, when you have insectivorous birds hanging around your orchard, yields for apples and your orchard crops improve.
The same thing is true for field crops, when you have birds that eat bugs, you do see improvements in your yields. But this is something that these economic ornithologists weren't able to show as well with the methods that they used back in the 20s and 30s.
Tracy (16:49):
So you mentioned in your piece that economic ornithology sort of fell out of favor in, I guess, its traditional sense. And part of the reason was because of the use of pesticides. So if you're spraying all your crops for bugs, you don't really need as many birds to eat those bugs. And so their usefulness kind of declines. Talk to us about that transition. And then again, coming back up to speed to modern day, what evidence do we have of the usefulness of birds in modern agriculture now?
Robert (17:21):
Sure. Right. So there were a handful of reasons why economic ornithology disappeared in the 1930s and the 1940s. And as you mentioned, a big one is that with the rise of effective and affordable pesticides and insecticides, farmers had much more control over the pests in their field. Before you had these pesticides, birds were kind of the best option that farmers had. And, you know, they had to rely on these almost natural methods of pest control.
But that wasn't the only reason that this field kind of disappeared. There are also some pretty significant methodological limitations. So first of all, it was not much of an applied science. They could show how many harmful bugs an individual bird might eat, but they didn't have reliable methods to show that if you build a birdhouse, you know, you'll be able to expect a 10% increase in yields on certain crops, or if you plant certain types of shrubs to attract birds that you'll be able to see specific impacts on your crop yields.
The second limitation is that they weren't really taking an ecological approach. They were looking at individual birds and how many bugs they might eat. And they were comparing kind of two facts that seem intuitive. On one hand, in the 1920s, every year bugs destroyed hundreds of millions of dollars of crops. And economists estimate that between 10% and 20% of crop yields every year were destroyed by insects.
On the other hand, you have data on these birds that, you know, one single bird every day might eat 1200 chinch bugs, for example and these are major pests for crops. And so you compare those things and you say ‘Well, intuitively more birds eating more bugs would mean that crop yields would improve.’ There is data now showing that birds do actually keep pests under control. But at the time, these economists weren't able to show that relationship. They weren't able to show the like baseline level of bugs would decrease when you had more birds.
There were critics, a lot of them were entomologists studying bugs that said like, you know, ‘If a bird is hanging around on your farm, you can actually prove that the bird is eating bugs on the farm.’ They observed birds flying over to the river to eat bugs and coming back and the ornithologist would, you know, shoot this bird and dissect its stomach and say ‘Okay, it's eating all of these bugs, but they're not actually bugs that are preying on crops.’ So they weren't able to establish that relationship at the level of individual birds and bugs.
Tracy (19:54):
Oh yeah. So I have a neighbor who is a reasonably famous ornithologist, actually, and the way he explained it to me was that when pests have population outbreaks — so if there's a big infestation of locusts or something — birds can't actually respond fast enough to really affect the numbers. But during non-outbreak years they can. So they decrease the baseline, as you mentioned?
Robert (20:17):
Yep, that's totally correct. And there's been a lot of recent research showing that birds do actually keep bug populations in check and they keep them at a manageable level. So they prevent these massive outbreaks of bugs that are what is really, really destructive to farmer's crops.
Joe (20:32):
Something I'm interested in here, is thinking about the timelines, late 1800s, can you situate a little bit further, how economic ornithology and this idea of ‘Well, let's study this by counting, we're going to get an eagle, we're going to dissect it. We're going to count the number of mice they ate over its lifetime, somehow based on what's in there,’ like, how it fit into sort of broader philosophies of government and management because, there were a lot of things also going around that time, and obviously there's the rise of Henry Ford and new ideas about managing a factory floor. And so it seemed to be, you know, an era of counting things and trying to apply scientific methods to things that maybe prior to that people just had intuitions for. Can you talk a little bit more about the sort of, the ideological era in which this field emerged?
Robert (21:23):
Yeah, for sure. So I might mention the attitudes that came before economic ornithology. And during that time, efore this bureau developed, so you know, and you read about this in attitudes as far back as the 1840s, 1850s, people had this idea that either through divine design or through providence, all of nature kind of existed in this balance where, you know, bugs kept plant populations in check, birds kept bug populations in check, other predators kept bird populations in check.
And when nature was in this like state of balance, you wouldn't have these massive infestations of bugs, you know, things would be stable. But with kind of the settlement of the country and clearing forests to make fields, humans had thrown off this balance and birds were the only force keeping bug populations in check. And so, you have this scientific field of economic ornithology that develops in the 1880s, but it's not contesting these previous ideas. Instead it's using these kind of modern statistical, scientific methods to kind of demonstrate that they're correct.
Tracy (22:53):
So I think there's a tendency when we read about economic ornithology to think that this is something that was popular in the late 1800s, early 1900s. It's kind of fallen out of favor for the reasons we've discussed, but in some ways you do see a revival of a more generalist concept of attaching economic value to animals in modern day conservation. And shout out to another podcast here, but Radiolab did a fantastic episode on this where they talked about, I think it was back in 2014 or something, there was a hunter that paid $350,000 to go to Namibia and shoot a lion. And there was a huge uproar about whether or not that should be allowed. But one of the arguments for allowing that kind of sport of hunting where people can pay to go kill animals was ‘Well, if you can put an actual monetary amount on the life of this particular animal, then it gives people incentive to protect it.’ So there is still an element of that theme running through some modern day conservation work, it feels like.
Robert (24:04):
Right. And I think that's a really interesting question and it's not an easy one. I think there's a lot of debate among conservationists about, you know, whether this is appropriate, whether this is more helpful than it is harmful. I think that there's a lot of different ways of trying to assign value to wildlife.
I mean, I think the way that you mentioned where there's a specific price placed on the head of an individual animal is one way. And I think it's interesting that that's kind of related to almost consumption. Like, you put a price on its head and what that lets you do is kill it, right? You kind of almost have ownership over this animal, but there's a lot of other ways of establishing value or pricing wildlife that kind of looks at it from a different direction.
So one way that ecologists assign value to wildlife is through something that they call ecosystem services. And that’s related to, you know, it's kind of a similar line of thinking as economic ornithology where you look at all of the different ways that animals and wildlife contribute value to humans. So sometimes it's through agriculture, sometimes it's through tourism and things like birdwatching — I'm a big bird watcher and I've spent a lot of money on traveling to see birds and, you know, buying binoculars and things like that. So wildlife in that way contributes to the economy.
Another way that some have suggested for putting a value on wildlife is through something that they call existence value. Like, you know, I’ve never seen a polar bear. I don’t know if I ever will, but it's worth something to me to know that they exist. And so, if it's worth $50 to say to all of us to know that polar bears are out there and to just like appreciate that, then polar bears individually or as a species are worth quite a bit to us.
And I think your example of Flaco is really interesting. This individual bird was worth quite a bit to the city alive. You know, a lot of people went out and looked for it. People traveled from outside of the city to come find this famous owl. There's a lot written about it and so it brought a lot of value, both kind of economic and sentimental to the city.
Joe (26:11):
I was going to say that there were polar bears at the Central Park Zoo, but apparently not. And I guess the last one, there’s one that was euthanized due to an inoperable thyroid tumor at age 27 in 2013. I feel like I saw Ida, no I think I saw Gus, years ago, but anyway, I guess the polar bear isn't there. So have people made attempts to put a dollar value on Flaco the owl?
Robert (26:39):
None that I've seen.
Joe (26:40):
Have you seen any Tracy?
Tracy (26:41):
I haven't. I did look a little bit beforehand to see if I could see something like in terms of insurance. But I have a slightly different question. If Flaco was worth, if we could find a dollar amount for him and say like, ‘Well, he’s worth a million dollars,’ let's say the insurance company says he's worth a million dollars, would he still be alive today?
Robert (27:02):
I don't know that that would've protected Flaco from flying into a building...
Tracy (27:08):
Well, this is actually another debate within New York City, what accommodation should be made so that birds are no longer flying into all these skyscrapers that we have.
Robert (27:19):
Totally. And I think that there are effective protections for birds. There's bird safe glass. You can put stickers on windows to make sure that birds can see them and don't fly into them. But all of this carries a cost to the developer or to the city to incentivize it. And it has a very real impact on the number of birds that are killed by flying into windows.
There are around 600 million birds that are killed every year by flying into windows and talking about the value of birds, like this is a pretty significant value across the continent to have these birds alive. It's hard to see that value if, you know, you just live in a house and one or two birds hit your window every year.
But thinking about birds as something that carries, you know, like an innate value that we can appreciate, but also an economic value to agriculture and kind of that shift in mentality, I think can help individuals and help cities and help the country do things to protect birds.
Joe (28:14):
How concerned are you about the expansion of wind power and how big of a deal is that?
Robert (28:20):
I think that's an interesting question. The number of birds that are killed every year by flying into wind towers is around 150,000. The number of birds killed by flying into windows is 600 million. The number of birds killed by cats is about 2.4 billion.
Tracy (28:37)
I was about to ask this question while staring...
Joe (28:40):
So wind is hardly anything compared to these other categories?
Robert (28:42):
No, and I think it's a distraction.
Joe (28:44):
Interesting. Okay.
Tracy (28:45):
I was about to ask the cat question while staring at our cat-owning producers in the [studio] window. Should we get rid of all the outdoor cats to save the birds? Should we put in restrictions?
Joe (28:57):
We’re going to take this like very delightful sort of conversation [and] make angry half the population by one answer or another by turning it into something controversial.
Robert (29:06):
It is a controversial question. It's been a controversial question for more than a hundred years. I think if you want to protect birds, you can't have cats outside. And there’s a lot of debates about the best way to keep cats outside and eliminate outdoor cats. And you look at how people talked about this question, again a hundred years, ago when they were thinking of birds as protecting our national security by ensuring our food supply, you know, they talked about it as a question of self-preservation, whether we keep cats or not, because cats killed birds and birds protect our crops. As people said it a hundred years ago, it's a question of cat preservation or bird preservation.
Joe (29:41):
I still don't get that. Just fly! Cats can't fly!
Robert (29:45):
Well, a lot of the birds that cats kill are baby birds. They climb up the tree, they raid the nest and they take out an entire bird family.
Tracy (29:55):
Also, birds are, some birds specifically, are dumber than you think.
Joe (30:04)
Alright, I won’t chide birds for flying.
Tracy (30:04)
My 13-year-old cat, many, many years ago and he had like a whole bunch of health problems. He had hyperthyroidism and a heart murmur. He managed to catch a turtle dove, which admittedly is one of the dumbest birds in the world. They're the ones that, like, when you're driving down the street, they're in the middle of the road and they will not move until the last second. But yeah, even that cat managed to catch a bird once. Alright. Robert Francis, author of the Bird History Substack, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots.
Robert (30:33):
Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure.
Tracy (30:48):
Joe, I really enjoyed that conversation. Are you interested in birds now?
Joe (30:52):
I really enjoyed that. Am I interested in birds? I don't know.
Tracy (30:56):
Do you want to come to my place and look at the birds? We saw a bald eagle in our garden the other day!
Joe (31:00):
I do like seeing rare birds and so I would like to see a bald eagle. No, I really enjoyed that conversation. You know what I was thinking about? You know, it's pretty incredible that economic ornithology was a respected field. It almost feels like it should be called ornithological accounting or something like that. I always sort of think that accounting is a more legitimate form of economics than economics is.
Tracy (31:24):
Oh, that's a good line.
Joe (31:25):
Yeah, a little spicy take for you there, but it seems like a lot to be said for fields where the primary method is ‘we’re just going to count things and we are going to count the number of birds. We are going to open up their stomachs and we are going to count the number of mice and we're going to count the number of grains that a typical mice eats, and then we're going to tally up the cost on one side and tally up the cost on the other side and see which is higher.’ I find that to be a very interesting sort of like form of practice.
Tracy (31:55):
I do also think that you can quibble with the methodology for some of this stuff and talk about whether economic ornithologists were overconfident in the values that they were estimating. But it does help to focus people's minds and attitudes on the benefits of wildlife when you start actually attaching values to it.
And I think we've seen instances of this over and over again, the vultures in India being another one, there was a mass die out of vultures in India and that ended up being extremely problematic and expensive. And before that, people hadn't really thought about, well ‘What is the value of these vultures?’
So I do think it's useful in that sense to sit and think through all these different connections in the ecosystem and the value you're deriving from it, whether it's in actual farming and growing things or, as Robert was saying, just in the idea that you get to enjoy the birds, you get to see Flaco flying high above the sky, although not anymore. RIP Flaco.
Joe (33:01):
RIP Flaco, indeed. You know, I'm also just interested in the sort of US government history and this time when, in the 1800s and then all through the 1900s, where a lot of government bureaus and divisions and divisions of bureaus, etc., were about assisting this great process of turning the West, turning the land, whether it's agricultural land [or something else], into something useful.
And so you end up with things like the Division of Economic Ornithology to help farmers and various bureaus that did, or all the various bureaus that helped build dams and build canals and turn the rivers for irrigation and things like that. It's interesting to find all these little niches within the expansion of government that really were providing these services, whether information services or sort of infrastructure services to the people, to sort of figure out how to use the land.
Tracy (33:58):
I like how you've come around to this because it's basically industrial policy.
Joe (34:02):
Right, yes. You get it. Yeah.
Tracy (34:04):
Shall we leave it there?
Joe (34:06):
Let’s leave it there.
You can follow Robert Francis at
@rbfrncs
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