S1 E2: Field Detectives with John Marzluff

John Marzluff is a professor of wildlife science in the UW School of Environmental and Forest Sciences and renowned researcher studying the relationships between birds and humans. 

On this episode of FieldSound, Marzluff discusses the intelligent, enigmatic and culturally-significant crow, the shared knowledge of crow communities, and the ways local habitat fragmentation and increased urbanization affect corvids (and corvids affect humans).

In 2022, Marzluff was named American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellow, honored for advances in our understanding of how humans impact birds, and for communicating the importance of birds to the public. Marzluff's research is supported by the Marzluff Bird Research Fund, and he is the current holder of the James W. Ridgeway Professorship in Forest Resources. 

Through immersive, narrative storytelling, FieldSound explores the world of environmental science together with researchers at the University of Washington College of the Environment.

https://environment.uw.edu/podcast

Transcript

00;00;00;08 - 00;00;14;08
John Marzluff
That makes them pretty unique in the bird world. I mean, there are other smart birds, but as a group, they are certainly one of the most fascinating and intelligent groups of birds.

00;00;15;25 - 00;00;40;29
Sarah Smith
From the University of Washington College of the Environment. This is FieldSound. Did you know that crows hold grudges? They also keep secrets. They're definitely judging you. They're opportunists. They're highly adaptable. And there are a lot, like scientists.

00;00;44;17 - 00;01;17;26
John Marzluff
I mean, I think the thing that makes them unique is their ability to solve problems. They're smart. They are flexible in their behavior, both from the standpoint of their behavior and interesting ecological roles they’ve fulfilled - in moving seeds around, caching seeds that, you know, restore forests. And also their abilities to communicate with one another and share their secrets with one another.

00;01;22;04 - 00;01;41;28
John Marzluff
That makes them pretty unique in the bird world. I mean, there are other smart birds, but as a group, they are certainly one of the most fascinating and intelligent groups of birds. And so once you start looking at them and get interested in them for a variety of reasons like I was, it's hard to go back to anything that's.

00;01;44;18 - 00;02;18;25
Sarah Smith
John Marzluff is a professor at the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences at the University of Washington College of the Environment. John Marzluff studies how humans affect birds through habitat fragmentation and increased urbanization. He's also interested in the ways birds affect people, how birds influence art, language. He's written several popular science books about crows. In 2022 Marzluff was named a fellow for the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

00;02;20;12 - 00;02;48;26
John Marzluff
Yeah. So, I mean, you may know my work is mainly on birds and their responses to human activity. We have my students and I have looked at lots of different things recreation, response to recreation in wildlands, timber harvest, military training, all kinds of weird things that we do to the land. A lot of work. On the response of birds to urbanization in the Seattle area.

00;02;48;27 - 00;03;03;27
John Marzluff
That was a long term project. We had kind of threw out that my personal interest is more with crows and ravens and those birds, and I've done a lot of work with those on their behavioral responses to people and how they live with us, because they seem good at living with us as opposed to a lot of other birds.

00;03;03;28 - 00;03;25;02
John Marzluff
So my current research is focused mainly in Yellowstone on ravens there and their interactions with people and wolves and pumas and other things there. So that's that's where, you know, most of my energy is right now. I do continue the face recognition work I did on campus.

00;03;25;18 - 00;03;30;23
Sarah Smith
Crows remember faces. They can recognize people, distinguish us from others.

00;03;31;16 - 00;03;54;02
John Marzluff
Once a year to test to see how the birds on our campus still respond to a dangerous person. And this will be the 16th year of that. There's one bird that we captured with this mask on that's still alive on campus. If you're up by Mary Gates Hall between Mary Gates Hall and Suzzalo, there's a little grassy space there and the bird is there pretty regularly.

00;03;54;16 - 00;04;24;11
John Marzluff
I was teaching up by there this quarter and we'd see her just about every day in Seattle, especially. Crows live so close to people and so fearlessly around people that surprised and interested me because growing up in other places and seeing these birds in more rural settings, they're not like that. They stay pretty far away from people and they're very wily and that a lot of it had been done about how they avoid us as a potential danger.

00;04;25;06 - 00;04;51;08
John Marzluff
But that didn't seem to be the case on campus, especially even in the town of Seattle generally. So we started looking at that more closely. Are they really acting different? And we found they were they were more tolerant of us being close to them. And it looked like they were also picking out particular people and being aggressive towards some and not so much towards others, maybe even flocking toward some to get food and not to others.

00;04;51;23 - 00;05;13;03
John Marzluff
So that led to this crazy idea of let's see if they recognize our face because we thought when we went to their nests and watched them that they would start to act differently around us as opposed to other people. So we did this crazy experiment of catching some birds with a particular face mask and then watching their response and and yeah, they really do.

00;05;13;03 - 00;05;49;28
John Marzluff
They know particular faces and they have passed on this information about dangerous people through their generations, across their generations. And that's led to the basically the development of a new culture of hate on our campus for the people that have wronged them in the past. And they pick us out and attack us kind of like they would a hawk or an eagle or other predator try to get us out of their territory when they see us when we wear this particular mask.

00;05;50;08 - 00;06;03;23
John Marzluff
That was an experiment that I figured was purely for fun. We'd be done in a you know, in a year and six years later, we're still doing this same crazy experiment because the birds keep passing.

00;06;08;12 - 00;06;16;28
Sarah Smith
Marzluff has spent time observing the adaptations of Corvids like crows and ravens. What were the big questions Marzluff was interested in?

00;06;17;22 - 00;06;40;26
John Marzluff
I mean, to me one of the biggest areas of mystery is communication. Seeing these great routes that they come to at night and trying to understand how those function, why they occur and what's being said at those. There's there's still many questions that we don't know the answer to. We don't have a clue what they're saying, who they're saying it to, what it means.

00;06;40;26 - 00;07;07;28
John Marzluff
Is it just, you know, letting off steam or are they planning or are they checking in with one another? Are they assessing potential, you know, mate opportunities or what? We don't know. And I don't know if we'll ever decode that language fully. We know some of the basic parts, but we don't know the real nuance of it and how it's affected by circumstance and situation that the bird is in.

00;07;08;14 - 00;07;30;19
John Marzluff
And it would be wonderful to be able to better assure and quantify and understand their language. And that would to me is mainly for crows and Ravens because it's such a variable language. I mean, we pretty well know what songbirds are saying most of the time. Other songbirds, I should say. They're saying, you know, stay out or come mate with me.

00;07;31;00 - 00;08;02;06
John Marzluff
And crows and ravens are saying a lot more than that. And we I mean, it's the very tip of the iceberg to get that understanding. And then I would say there's also an interesting frontier with how I mean, of course, with how the bird brain works. We know again how songs are learned. And most of the modeling of the the Brain of a Bird has been based upon song learning.

00;08;02;18 - 00;08;31;21
John Marzluff
A lot of that done at the U by David Burchell and Elliott Brownowitz over in biology and psychology and Mike Beecher, who was there. So we know that pathway very well. They're still working out the details. So they would argue that we don't know much at all. But you know, looking at it as a non-expert, they're it's like, wow, we really know a lot about that circuit, but we don't know a lot about circuits that basically encode and inform other behavior.

00;08;32;04 - 00;09;05;05
John Marzluff
So other than making a sound and so like our work that showed some of the areas in the brain that are used for complex thought and cognition, those are just barely describing, you know, here's a place in the brain that does this and that I think will also set up lots of future work on how does that place really work, How does it integrate with other places, too, to make what I think are these kind of emotional, geographically relevant or spatially relevant memories?

00;09;06;06 - 00;09;36;04
John Marzluff
And how is that encoded and how does that then translate into a behavior in a particular place or a given situation later? And I think, you know, we're just scratching that surface. Once we see this behavior, then you want to understand how does that how do they do that neurally and neurologically and sometimes and I would say, especially at University of Washington, you have the ability to bring in other people with different expertise.

00;09;36;04 - 00;10;09;24
John Marzluff
So working with Donna Cross and Robert Miyoko in Radiology, we're able to image bird brains. Now that had not been done in an active way to understand really how the crow is using its brain to identify, remember, and communicate basically these dangers. And so being at a big place like like the U. Allows allows us to bring in those different perspectives and dive even deeper than you would ever imagine and you would be able to do.

00;10;10;05 - 00;10;18;25
Sarah Smith
Yeah, and I can imagine that having that more expansive approach probably just leads to even more even more questions.

00;10;18;26 - 00;10;24;25
John Marzluff
And unfortunately, we're questions that, yeah, there's no shortage of questions. There's only a shortage of time.

00;10;25;07 - 00;10;37;15
Sarah Smith
Right. Right, exactly. So what interested you in your, you know, the science that you do? What kind of got you started?

00;10;38;02 - 00;11;06;05
John Marzluff
Yeah, I mean, it started a long time ago in high school. I had two really great high school biology teachers, one of which took us hiking to Colorado. I was in high school and Kansas basically got us out in the field to collect data and to observe nature at all. Basically all the time. I remember as a sophomore he asking if anybody wanted to go on a field trip this weekend that they were going to go out and catch porcupines in western Kansas.

00;11;06;05 - 00;11;27;24
John Marzluff
And I was like, yeah, I mean, on that. And I just, you know, that hook was set pretty hard at that point, catching things and going out and observing how animals lived and where they lived and how they interacted with people. We, you know, do crazy things like take hundreds of snakes out of people's basements that where they happen to be hibernating for the winter.

00;11;27;29 - 00;11;34;04
Sarah Smith
John Marzluff likes to get his students out there like his high school teacher did, observing what nature is presenting.

00;11;35;03 - 00;11;56;08
John Marzluff
Yeah, I mean, I try to teach more by example than anything. So we're out there gathering data with them, like my high school teacher did with us. He got us out there collecting data. You don't just watch. You watch and write things down or or measure things, whatever it is. So you start to quantify what you're seeing. So my colleague Erin Wirsing and I have been taking students to Yellowstone.

00;11;56;08 - 00;12;30;00
John Marzluff
Now for I've been 25 years since I've been at the U. And when we go there, we show them the work we're doing. We catch our animals, we tag them, they see that, they follow them, they see the technologies we use, but we also have them collect data on other things, like the vigilance of elk and how our elk acting where there's wolves or not wolves and and get them to collect some data and then also give them the ability to use larger data sets when they get back to campus to ask more sophisticated questions.

00;12;30;00 - 00;12;50;21
John Marzluff
And so we we model what's going on in the field. We have them participate and collect data. And then when we get back to school, they have to ask questions and have testable hypotheses and look at the literature to see what's known about the question in areas that they're interested in and then do some analysis to test their ideas.

00;12;51;06 - 00;13;18;23
John Marzluff
It doesn't have to be publishable quality, although we produced papers out of this kind of approach. But it gets them to work through all the steps observation collection hypothesis formulation and testing, and then writing and communicating. They have to give their presentations really to the Seattle community when they get back. So I think having all those steps in place is what's important.

00;13;18;23 - 00;13;30;16
John Marzluff
So they see they're not just a technician collecting data, they are thinking about questions, they're answering questions, they're informing others about their findings. That's all really important.

00;13;31;21 - 00;14;01;28
Sarah Smith
But it's a special thanks to our guest, John Marzluff. You can learn more about Marzluff’s research and the University of Washington College of the Environment by clicking the link in this episode description, or by visiting our website: environment.uw.edu. From all of us at FieldSound, thanks for listening.