How to Put a Price on a Bird: the Forgotten Science of Economic Ornithology

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1:26Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. And I'm Joe Weisenthal. Joe, did you hear the sad news? Okay. I guess. 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. That is such shade. That is such shade against Flacco the Owl. I can't believe you're saying that. 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.

2:04OK, 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. Flacco the owl died recently. We're recording this on February 27th. He died over the weekend. And 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.

2:45And 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. Yeah. So there were a bunch of spottings, right, in Central Park and elsewhere. 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. It is kind of wild that in a city this big, like a single bird could just be spotted all over the place for the wild. People would notice. Like, oh, this is that bird. Like, that's pretty cool. Well, he stood out, right? He's not native.

3:20Again, the clue is in the name, Eurasian Eagle Owl. But I have to ask, how much do you think an owl like Flacco is worth? Oh, wow. Huh. That's a good question. I don't know. Like, how much would it cost, like, if I wanted to acquire one? Like, are you thinking that, like, on the open market? 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.

4:00But maybe, maybe Flacco 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 pets. But on the other hand, you know, 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 show. I'm sorry to regale you with them at like nine in the morning.

4:39No, I, you know, look, clearly the death of Flacco meant more to you than me, but just objectively listening to you, you're like, wow, there's some really interesting questions here that I just would never have thought about at all in terms of the connection between, yeah, there must be some dollar value. There must be, there is some economic value associated with a bird that people love, that is rare, that would have 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.

5:14You know what, Joe? We don't even have to speculate about this. Okay. We don't have to. Why do we have the answer? Well, it turns out there is actually a whole body of economics that deals with exactly this topic. It is economic ornithology. Can I just say something, Tracy? Yes. I think you're more interested in this topic than any other episode we've done in about a year. This is my revenge for like 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. Yeah. Okay. Fair. I should have brought in a bird for us to look at while we're here.

5:47No, 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. Let's do it. Okay. I'm very, very happy. Joe less so. No, 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.

6:29So, Robert, thank you so much for coming on All Thoughts. Thanks for having me. 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? 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.

7:13And 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's throughout society that 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.

7:59So, all right, 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 in economic language, what do we talk about? What does it sound like? How are they describing these birds? 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 destroy, might affect the orchards or things like that.

8:37And it's really looking at birds at an individual level. So they're thinking about, you know, 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, how much 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?

9:12And where does the balance lie? Are they more helpful to the farmers or are they more harmful? 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, you know, this robin is worth like$853 to me in terms of crop protection every year.

9:56Yeah. And, you know, 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 two cents of grain over the course of a year. And a single hawk, based on finding, you know, how many mice that they find in a dissected hawk's stomach, a single hawk might eat a thousand mice over the course of a year. So, you know, 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.

10:33and each chicken might be worth 50 cents to a farmer. So, you know, 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. So, 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 the farmer, you know, you might save yourself three dollars by by killing this hawk that that occasionally eats your chickens but you're actually costing yourself twenty dollars by you know in lost grain so is the basically the a hawk eating a chicken is a very visible thing the hawk eat my my chicken what you don't i mean there's just sort of like almost econ 101 the scene the unseen a little bit but it's like what they probably the hawk eating the mouse which would is a grain is just not something that would be as front of mind for the following.

11:32Yep, exactly. And so, you know, this bureau that was established in 1885 is looking at, you know, all of these birds that have these reputations as pests, crows that will eat your corn, robins that will peck at your apples, and that farmers had traditionally killed. And they were trying to act as 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 that, 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.

12:16And that impact is greater than the harm that they cause by opening up the occasional ear of corn.

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13:57It's built to grow with your business, whether you are just starting out or already scaling up. Plus, it's easy to use, customizable, and designed to streamline every process. So you can focus on what really matters, running your business. Thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you? Try Odoo for free at odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com. So you touched on this earlier, the idea of, you know, 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, you know, sat on my front porch watching sparrows eat my grain, would I be sat there thinking, like, it's OK, they're also eating, like, some weed seeds and some harmful bugs?

14:47So that's all good. Like, how much was this embedded in the popular consciousness at the time? You know, at the end of the 1800s, I would say not very much. Again, there was this tradition. I mean, 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 that sometimes pay farmers to kill hawks. So, you know, it was pretty 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, you know, over time pushing out information about the positive impact that birds had on agriculture.

15:29And it became much more accepted and much more popular to think of birds as as helpful to agriculture. You know, you saw the end of these bounty laws. You saw these publications that I referenced in the Saturday Evening Post and in, you know, just like popular magazines talking about the importance of birds. You also had publications in something called the Farmer's Bulletin that went out to farmers that they could read, you know, to learn about how to improve their crop yields. And, you know, alongside articles about, you know, best practices with like planting and tilling, you had these articles about building birdhouses to attract certain kinds of birds.

16:04Something 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 a harming. You know, this is like they sort of – and I have to wonder. So like I'm looking at your substack and there's this picture of economic ornithologists. And they seem to be wearing three-piece suits and these like very fancy silk ties in the photo. and I wonder if like the farmers out in the middle of the country you know they have these notions like oh this bird's good they're like grumbling about the economists in their white towers yeah exactly that and then the economists and their three peach twos are like well actually this bird is good for you and I'm curious if there's like a sort of you know today people don't like hearing from economists often because economists say this is actually good for you and you thought it was bad like look I know I don't need to listen to you I know it's good and bad I'm curious if that sort of culture clash was evident even back then if like these economists from the Bureau came trying to tell farmers what they should and shouldn't kill.

17:09Totally. And, you know, I haven't seen instances where there was like actually 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 like a decrease in the number of hawks that were killed. But at the same time, like 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.

17:39And some of this tension still exists today. 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. 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.

18:24And 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. 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 kind of some of the methodological limitations of these progressive era economic ornithologists.

19:04But more recent research that, you know, 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, you know, that when you have insectivorous birds hanging around your orchard, yields for apples and for 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.

19:37So 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, like what evidence do we have of the usefulness of birds in modern agriculture now? Sure, right. So there were a handful of reasons why economic ornithology disappeared in the 1930s and the 1940s.

20:17And 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 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'll be able to expect a 10 % increase in yields on certain crops.

21:02Or if you plant certain types of shrubs to attract birds, 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, you know, in the 1920s, there were every year bugs destroyed hundreds of millions of dollars of crops. And economists estimate that between 10 and 20 percent 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 1 ,200 cinch bugs, for example, and these are major pests for crops.

21:48And 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 that baseline level of bugs would decrease when you had more birds. There were critics, a lot of them were entomologists studying bugs that said, 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.

22:25And the ornithologist would shoot this bird and dissect its stomach and say, OK, 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. 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'd mentioned.

23:05Yep, 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 farmers' crops. Something I'm interested in here is thinking about the timelines, the late 1800s. Can you situate a little bit further like how bird or economic ornithology and this idea of, well, let's study this by counting. Let's just look. We're going to have an eagle. We're going to dissect it. We're going to count the number of mice of eight over its lifetime somehow based on what's in there.

23:44Like how it fit into sort of broader philosophies of government and management. Because, you know, there were a lot of things also going around that time. And obviously there's the rise of like 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 ideological era in which this field emerged? Yeah, for sure. So I might mention what kind of came before the attitudes that came before economic ornithology.

24:17And during that time, or before this Bureau developed, so 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, you know, clearing forests to make fields, humans had thrown off this balance and birds were the only force keeping bug populations in check.

25:08And so you have this scientific field of economic ornithology that develops in the 1880s. It's not contesting these previous ideas. Instead, it's using these kind of like modern statistical scientific methods to kind of demonstrate that they're correct.

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