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Businesses that are selling through the roof, like Untuck it, make selling and for shoppers buying simple with Shopify, home of the number one checkout on the planet. And with shop pay, you can boost conversions up to 50%. Businesses that sell more sell on Shopify. Upgrade your business and get the same checkout Untuck it uses. Sign up for your $1 per month trial period@shopify.com podcastfree all lowercase. Go to shopify.com podcastfree to upgrade your selling today. Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radiolab Radio Lab from WNY and npr. Give everybody a level check. We're gonna start the show with this fellow. His name's Ben Zimmer. He's the on language columnist for the New York Times Magazine. Cause we figured out since we wanted to do a show called Oops, right, we thought we should call men. And so he came into the studio and he brought with him a bunch of his favorite oopses as an example, I just wanted to give one of my favorite examples of. The first one that he hit us with began its life. Was it in an AP news article? Well, it was an AP story, but the AP story was fine. When the AP story appeared on a news site from the American Family association, which, by the way, is a conservative Christian group, the headline, first of all said, homosexual eases into 100 final at Olympic trials. Was it kissing guys or something that they would be good at? Well, if you read on, if you're confused by that headline, very. Here's how it starts. Tyson homosexual easily won his semifinal for the 100 meters at the US Olympic track and field trials. And, and it goes on to say throughout the entire article on Saturday, homosexual misjudged the finish in his opening heat. The entire article had the word homosexual in place of gay. The sprinter's name is Tyson Gay. Oh, my God. According to Ben, this is a classic, classic example of a search and replace. Oops. This group apparently did not like the word gay because gay makes homosexuality sound very nice and very gay. Very gay. Right. So what they did was they ran a search and replaced every instance of the word gay with the word homosexual. But then you get Tyson Gay becoming Tyson homosexual. This was just one that they were a little careless with. Just to be fair. Here's a contrasting example. In 1990, the Fresno Bee ran an article about the Massachusetts budget crisis, and it made reference to new taxes that will help put Massachusetts quote, back into the African American. And they had to issue a correction Saying it should have said, back in the black. Now, this one might have been a newsroom prank. We're not sure. But it did get into the paper, right? Just for the hell of it, here's one last one. This one happened after the famous broadcaster Walter Cronkite died. When the Chicago Tribune did their online obituary for Cronkite. What happened was every instance of Cronkite got replaced by Mr. Cronkite. You can understand the thinking behind that. They're deciding, okay, for the deceased males, they should be referred to with the title mister. But then what this turns into is an obituary where it says, he was born Walter Leland, Mr. Cronkite Jr. And it refers to his radio show, Walter. Mr. Cronkite's 20th century. It's got things about his family, his son Walter, Mr. Cronkite III, his daughter. His daughter Kathy. Mr. Cronkite. Oops, my heart went oops. I'm Jad. The moment that we met, my heart went oops. And I'm Rober. On this episode of Radiolab 4, Oopses. Starting with a tree that went oops. Then we've got a goose that went oops. And an entire town that went oops. And a Harvard professor that really went oops. Now, we should just say, before we start, oops. Oops is. Oops can be a misleading term. Really, what we're talking about here is something Greek. You try hard to prevent one thing, and then you get exactly what you didn't want to get back at you. Right. And our first story falls into that category. Back a few seasons ago, we were doing a show on deception, and we ended up talking with a professor. Yes, Named Ruben Gurr. Hello. Hi, is this Professor Gurr? Yes, speaking. He's a psychiatrist who works at the University of Pennsylvania. And I'd called him to talk about his research on self deception. Self deception. It's fascinating stuff. And I'm not going to go into it now, because somewhere along the way, the conversation took a really weird turn. No. Oh, yeah. Get out. Yeah. Yeah. And it happened when he began to tell me about some studies, strange studies done by a. What was the guy's name? His name is hanging on. I'll remember a second. Murray was his name. Henry Murray. And the reason we want to hear about Henry Murray is what? I built it up. Don't you want to know more? Not yet, no. Tell me more. Okay. I'm gonna let it unfold. Because we were so interested in what Ruben Gruer told us that we found a Guy who knows a whole lot about. Professor Murray's name is Alston Chase. Very windy day today, isn't it? And he lives in a remote cabin in Mondana, in the woods in the foothills. Professor Murray was a very prestigious scholar. He had been a professor of psychology at Harvard before the second. During the war, he went to work for the oss, the Office of Strategic Services, which was the forerunner of the CIA. And a couple of years into his government service, says Alston, something happened that really spooked him and spooked the country. During the Korean War. There were some GIs, he said, who'd been captured in Korea. And afterwards, after the Korean War, they refused to come home. They appeared to have betrayed their country, renounced their own country, and disappeared behind Red China's bamboo. Does anybody want to go home? No. The CIA and their military establishment was very much concerned that the communists had found techniques for brainwashing. And so Murray and other psychiatrists in the government were charged with preparing those soldiers to resist that kind of brainwashing. And Murray himself developed a style of interrogation, stressful interrogation was the term used that the army could use on its pilots. Yeah, he developed this method of kidnapping them before they were sent on the mission. And then, says Reuben Gurr, he'd run them through a battery of tests to see if they break. And if they didn't break, then they were fine to fly. This kind of psychological training was, was kind of a new front in the Cold War. And in the 1950s, Murray's back at Harvard and he's thinking of ways to fine tune his techniques. And this is where things get interesting. He took a class of Harvard undergraduates, 20 some odd sophomores, mostly students were told to write an autobiographical essay, like a diary. And he told them, you know what, make it very personal. Write your deepest thoughts in there highest aspirations and hopes, and while you're at it, write about your sexual fantasies. Go ahead, write a class. And after the students were done, he said to them, now I'm gonna pair you up into groups of two to debate or discuss what they'd written. Students were like, okay, we'll share, no big deal. But they were duped. They were walked into this very brightly lit room, which turned out to be an interrogation room with a one way mirror, put in a chair, strapped in, electrodes were attached to their arms, chest, their heart, to measure stress, basically. And they were also filming through the mirror. And then instead of a classmate, in walked a total stranger, older man, this guy was holding their essay. They didn't know It. But Murray had trained him to do everything he could to anger and humiliate the undergraduate. And he just tore them apart piece by piece, using the essay to mock the student's aspirations and thoughts. Then after this was done, these students have to come back week after week to view themselves on film being humiliated. That, to me, seems like the worst part. After they'd been humiliated, they had to watch themselves being humiliated over and over. People became tearful and miserable. And he was proud how he destroyed people. What kind of a person is this? Like, why did he do it? Yeah, why Murray did it. There are any one of a number of explanations, and they all could be true. One is it was grant grabbing. He was getting money to do these things also, you know, this was the Cold War. He was fighting communism. He may have thought it was justified. Yeah, but he just said he was proud of this. Well, it also happens to be the case that he was having an affair for about 30 years with a woman, not his wife. And they had a sexual relationship that bordered on the sadomasochist. In fact, was sadomasochistic. In other words, Murray's interest in these was intensely personal. Whatever the case, in those Harvard experiments, there was one student who was just not prepared for any of it. His code name was Lawful. Lawful. They gave each of these students a code name because he was considered so conventional. He was really still just a boy, graduated high school at 16, was living 1,000 miles from home, two shirts and two trousers to his name. And Lawful apparently was an especially lonely kid. The notes I found of Murray did refer specifically to Lawful's essay, which he saw as highly alienated. So when Lawful walked into that room, sat across from that stranger, the guy really did a job on him. He was young, so he was barely growing a beard. So the first thing that the guy tells him is, what is this on your chin? Something trying to look like a beard. Then the guy opens up Lawful's essay and lets him have it. Meanwhile, like all the students, Lawful had been hooked up to all these stress monitors. I analyzed his data. Compared to all the other participants, he had far and away the strongest response, physiologically, you mean like his heart beat the fastest in a life. He beat everything through the roof. Amazingly, this experiment went on for three years and decades later. A lot of the subjects were still upset and considered it one of the most traumatic experiences they'd had in their twenties. Lawful never forgot it. That's right. He was resentful at the way he was treated at Harvard. He had nightmares about Professor Murray, after he left Harvard. So what happened to this guy? Well, he finished up his four years at Harvard, got his degree, then got a PhD in math. Then he began to teach math, and then he became a household name. What do you mean? Well, I mean this. The FBI raid began just after noon in a remote mountainous area called Stemple Pass, about five miles outside the town of Lincoln, Montana. Turns out that Lawful's real name, Theodore Kaczynski. No. Oh, yeah. Where Kaczynski was known. Get out. Yeah. The FBI dubbed him the Unabomber. In nearly 18 years, he found targets all over the country. His meticulously made bombs have killed three people and injured another 23. Blew my arm off to the side like this, and the first thing I thought was, why did they do that? Do you think that this study had anything to do with Ted Kaczynski's subsequent very infamous acts? Well, I think he probably would have if it hadn't been for that experiment. He would have still probably would have been maybe reclusive, living somewhere in a cabin in Montana. Regardless. But I think the evil twist was done there. Years later, while he was researching a book, Alston Chase corresponded with Kaczynski. In one of his letters, he mentioned that he participated in some psychological experiments conducted by Professor Murray. Of course, I was very curious, and I wrote it back to tell me a little bit more about it. And he said, well, you really don't. I don't know if you want to go into that can of worms. Reuben Gore is a professor of psychiatry at University of Pennsylvania, and Alston Chase is the author of Book Book Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber. Here's one more from Ben Zimmer. What is the Cupertino effect? The Cupertino Effect is the name given to the phenomenon of when you rely on a spell checker too much, it will give you a suggestion. And very often it's a suggestion that you really shouldn't take. Why is it called the Cupertino effect? Well, in early spell checkers, if you wrote cooperation, the word cooperation, C o, o, P E R a T, I, o, N. Perfectly typical spelling of the word cooperation in early spell checkers. That word was not there because it expected you to spell it. C O hyphen. And so what it would do is it would give you a suggestion. And the suggestion was Cupertino, the name of the town in California. So if you look at documents that are still online from the un, from the eu, from NATO, you'll find dozens and dozens of cupertinos that have found their way in there. For instance, here's a German NATO officer was quoted as saying, the cupertino with our Italian comrades proved to be very fruitful. And then there was a proposal from the EU's Scientific and Technical Research Committee. They proposed, quote, stimulating cross border cupertino. Oops. Number two, you go. The next one is just a different flavor entirely. We're going to meet someone. I don't know. I can't really say that he did anything wrong. Yeah, I mean, this one is more like, would you say luck? I mean, suppose you're just picked up a toothbrush and it was connected to a snake, that was connected to a monster that was connected to the devil himself. You wouldn't know, you're just picking up a tooth. So this is a case where really bad things happen. The story comes from our own reporter, Pat Walters. Yeah, it concerns. I don't know. Go ahead and. Okay, so just to start, I want you to imagine you're on a mountaintop. Okay. This mountain is in western Nevada, the second highest peak in the state of Nevada. Got a name. It's called Wheeler Peak. And who's this? This is Michael Cohen. I go by Michael P. Cohen. He's a nature writer. And he tells me that up on top of this mountain there is a grove of old trees. You can see the trees from a distance and their wood is so bright that it actually glistens in the sun. What are they called? Oh, Bristlecone pines. Yes. Can you describe what they look like? Sure. They tend to be shorter, broad at the base. They get very, very old. And as they get old, they become tortured or gnarled. They sort of twist up towards the sky. The overall effect is sort of electrical. They look kind of like what you'd see in a Tim Burton movie. So you have that picture? Yeah. In your mind? Yep. Okay, so the story is about this scientist named Don Curry. I'm going to take a drink of water. Wait, I'm going to take a drink of water. Okay. Story starts in 1964. Don Curry was a graduate student from North Carolina, and he was young. Do we know how old he was? He was 30 years old and he'd just gotten a big grant from the National Science foundation to do some climate change research. Not like climate change now, though, climate change thousands of years ago. Because he learned that you can actually sort of travel back in time, go back into the past, using the spacing between tree rings, the annual rings. This is Ron Lanner. He's a retired Forest Service scientist, and he says you can use the width of the tree rings to determine whether it was colder at one time or rainier at one period in the tree's life or whatever. So Curry's up on top of this mountain, up amongst these trees, and he needs to find one that he can look inside and kind of see what the weather was like way back in the past. Five minutes of looking is all that was involved. This is from a Nova documentary. Curry died a few years ago, and this is actually the only time that he ever talked about this story on tv. Literally. He found a tree there, the first old tree that we climbed to that he described as looking super, super old. So Curry takes out this special drill which scientists use to take, like, a core sample to look at the rings. Yeah, he presses it up against the tree, give it a good push to get it through the bark, and he starts twisting it in clockwise into the tree. But he wasn't having much luck. The normal approach to coring the tree wasn't working. It becomes harder and harder for him to turn this thing into the tree. And eventually the bit of his drill broke off in the tree. Oh, this isn't just any drill. He ordered it from Sweden. The whole time he's thinking, if I can't get this thing out of the tree, that would mean the research project would be lost for the year. So at this point, he kind of lumbers back down the mountain, and dejected, he managed to find the district brainger and told him the problem. Guys, my drill, it got stuck in the tree. What should I do? And they tell him, don't worry about it, Don. We'll just cut the tree down. This is one tree. There are dozens of these trees all around. So they start slicing into the tree. It takes a while to cut it down because it's really dense, full of knots and gnarls. And eventually the tree falls over. Then they cut some slabs out of the lower part of the tree. Curry gets one of these slabs back to his lab, throws it on a big desk, finds a magnifying glass because the rings are really small. And he starts counting. One, two, three. And as he counts, he's making little pinholes or pencil marks. Every 50 or 100 years. 3, 17. By the end of the first day, he gets back to a thousand years, like the Dark Ages were in Europe, eating raw possum. Day two, 2006. By the middle of the day, he gets back to, like, Jesus, Roman Empire gladiators and centurion. But even at that point, he was only, like, halfway finished. He kept counting. We could begin to see that we were getting over 4000 years. Over 4500, over 4600. And we ended around 4900 years. It had 4844 annual rings in it. And at that point, the oldest tree that anyone had ever found was 4,600 years old. In other words, he had himself the oldest tree ever, but he had killed it. And you gotta think, I've got to have done something wrong. I better recount. I better recount again. But no matter how many times he counted the rings, the number never went down. The world's oldest tree was dead. It was. It was truly. It was horrifying. It was a. It was like a family tragedy. People had given these trees names. There was Buddha and Socrates and Methuselah. They'd called Curry's tree the Prometheus tree. And the guy who named that particular tree was so angry that he wrote a magazine article where he called Don Curry a murderer. All across the country, there was a tremendous uproar, saying. Saying what about killing the world's oldest living organism? What? I thought we were just. I think it was the oldest living tree. It's both. It's the oldest tree and it's the oldest organism. Wait, wait, wait. You mean that the oldest continuously living animal. Shrub, mushroom. Are you making. Are you sure about this? What you just said was this is the oldest living continuous individual alive on the planet. I know what I said. This tree was older than any other tree on the planet. Older than the oldest sponge, which is like 1500 years old. Older than the oldest animal, just some sort of oyster, which is 405 years old. Older than any other living thing on the entire planet. Oh, God, Where do we go? Where do we go from there? So where does that leave Mr. Curry? So what happened? Well, right after this happened, Curry pretty much stopped doing research on trees. He basically studied salt flats for the rest of his career. Big, treeless salt flats. And aside from that little NOVA clip that we played before, he hasn't really ever gone on record talking about this. So it's hard for us to say how he really felt about it. But there was this one moment he was being interviewed by a TV reporter, like, about his salt flats research. This would have been in the 19, probably the late 80s, early 90s, years and years after the whole tree incident. All of a sudden, out of a clear blue sky, the television reporter asked him, oh, aren't you the Curry who killed the world's Oldest tree. He was completely ambushed and Curry just turned his back and ran away. So that sustain is just never gonna wear off somebody. But on the other hand, he did have the incredible misfortune to kill the oldest living organism on our planet. Yeah, but this is 25 years later and he's still getting hassled about this tree. We're talking about one tree here? Well, no, we're talking about the tree here. Right. The thing about a tree that lasts for. For almost 4,000 years, more than that, 5,000 years, almost sure. Is that it is a repository. It is a talisman for 5,000 years of Earth history. But, I mean, would it be. Would it be any less bad if the tree were three and a half thousand years old? This is just one more old thing. Notice it's the oldest of all. You're taking like the Guinness Book of World Records. Oh, you keep making me into like a Ripley's Believe it or not guy. But no, that's exactly what you're being. No, no, no, there's a. When you've been around longer than everybody else, there's a sort of vagueness which I've never experienced. Yeah, have you? Well, I'm a lot older than you. I walk in here and I look at you and I feel pity for all the things you don't know. Consider what the tree must have felt. I've been in a rage. Please. But it must have been the wrong time. That was reporter Pat Walters. And we're happy to say that since our original broadcast of the story, a new oldest living tree has been found. It's also a bristlecone pine, also in the White Mountains. And its current age, according to Dr. Peter Brown of the Rocky Mountain Tree Ring Research Group, is just about 5060 years old, which makes it actually older than Don Creek tree when it was cut down. So, Don Curry, if you're out there listening from the afterlife, you can now rest in peace. We'll continue in a moment. Hi, this is Chuck from Albany, New York. Radiolab is supported in part by the National Science foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan@www.sloan.org. radiolab is supported by BILT. Nobody wants to pay rent, but if you have to, BILT works to make it more worthwhile. By paying rent through bilt, you can earn flexible points that can be redeemed toward hundreds of hotels and airlines, a future rent payment, your next Lyft ride, and more. But it doesn't stop there. 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By uniting employees, teams and departments in one system, Rippling works to remove the bottlenecks, busy work and silos in business software. With Rippling, you can choose to run hr, IT and finance operations as one, or pick and choose the products that best fill the gaps. Right now you can get 6 months free when you go to rippling.com Radiolab learn more at r I p p l-I n g.com terms and conditions apply. Radiolab is supported by Planet Visionaries, the podcast created in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. Stay tuned for a trailer and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Alex Honl, professional rock climber and founder of the Honl Foundation. I wanted to let you know about a brand new season of the Planet Visionaries podcast in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. This is the podcast exploring bold ideas and big solutions from the people leading the way in conservation. Join me in conversation with the likes of climate champion Mark Ruffalo, biologist and photographer Christina Mittermeier, and one of the most successful conservations of our time, Chris Tompkins. Join us on Planet Visionaries wherever you get your podcasts. And now, to keep us in our oopsy mood, here's another Cupertino oops from language expert Ben Zimmer. So back in October 06 Reuters the newswire had an article about honeybees and there were some very interesting sentences in this article about honeybees. For instance, did you know Queen Elizabeth has 10 times the lifespan of workers and lays up to 2,000 eggs a day? That's why she's a very nice girl, but doesn't have a lot because there's all these eggs dropping on the floor. With its highly evolved social structure of tens of thousands of worker bees commanded by Queen Elizabeth, the honeybee genome could also improve the search for genes linked to social media. I get it. So every time a queen reference came in, they were commanded to that particular queen. Whenever the words the queen appeared in this article, it had to be the queen. So the queen was being replaced with Queen Elizabeth. Unfortunately, in an article about honeybees, Oops. This next oop. Singular. Oop. Wouldn't it be, I mean, if you have one. Oop. Wouldn't be. I never heard that. Well, it's just a new coinage. Oop. This next one, it raises a question of, I guess you'd say of moral balance. A question that I don't think any of us would want to have to answer comes to us from our producer, Lulu Miller. Okay, so set up this story. This story happens where it's in a little town in northern Michigan called Mayo. 7am Just drove through the Delaware Water Gap. That's me on my way out there from New York. The sun is rising and it's about an 800 mile drive and it's just gorgeous out here. Listen to you. Lush and all into the outdoors. Nazi. Yeah, a little bit, I know, but I'm just one of those people. I open my windows and when I get out into nature, I feel my place in the world. Anyway, just crossed into Mayo, what was the reason you were going again? To see a bird. A very. Not just rare, not just the kind of bird birders get obsessed about. This is a bird. This is what they call a lifebird. A lifebird. Birders wait their life to see it. Really? Yeah. Only found right here. What's the bird called? The Kirtland warbler. So now, have you seen a Kirtland's before? No, I've never seen one. This is my first trip up here. This right here. Where are you? We're just outside of the town on the edge of the forest, about to go in, and I'm standing with about 15 people who've come from everywhere. Where are you folks coming from to see this bird? Toledo. I'm from South Carolina. We're from Oregon. Wyoming. We'll walk out to a spot, try to stay single file. Park ranger leads us down a path into a little clearing. And pretty immediately in the background there, way back there, a guy from Ohio spots a kirtland. There he is. Yeah. A tiny yellow bird back there. Right there, up high in a jack. Pine tree. Oh, yeah. Oh, great. It's singing like crazy. A lady from Dayton starts clapping you down. Describe what you're seeing. I see a lovely bird with a gray back. This is a guy from Oregon, Jim Coleman. Blue, gray back. And his wife Rita. Smaller than a robin, brilliant yellow in the sunlight. It's just an absolutely radiant bird. Is this worth the trip to Morgan? Oh, you bet. I don't know. It just makes me thankful that I'm here. And it makes me grateful that my wife is here. I know this is something she's wanted to see for a long time. Jim actually starts to tear up. This is a very special bird. Hoa ham. And that's what this story is really about. How special is this bird? Meaning? Well, how much is a species worth? Well, here's the backstory. Okay. In the early 70s, the warbler almost went extinct. The reason why it was thought was because of a little creature called the cowbird. Want to go in? Okay. That's just the sound of them laughing. It's a parasite, you know, and some. And who is this guy? This is Chris Mensing, fish and wildlife biologist with the U.S. fish and Wildlife Service. And we're standing in this cage full of cowbirds. It looks like we've got six males and. And one female. Let me grab a couple. He just reached out and grabbed two of them. You're good at that. The males. Yeah. Go ahead. Imagine a tiny little gnarly crow. They've got really sharp little beaks, but with this blunt dagger like beak. Very drab body, very dull. So here's what the cowbird does to the warbler While the warbler is out of its nest. Like getting a worm or something. Yeah. The cowbird lays one of its own eggs in the nest to make room for it. So the warbler doesn't know anything is up. It pushes out one of the warbler's eggs, get out of the nest. And the timing is such that the cowbird egg will hatch first and will double its size in 24 hours. So by the time that the host birds hatch, that cowbird may be up to four times the size. And when they start begging for food from the parents, the loudest, most aggressive chick is going to get fed. The cubbir chick. So the warp warbler mom ends up shoveling food into this cowbird chick. Yep. Oftentimes they get so much food that another warbler chick will die. So when the cowbirds first showed up in this area in the late 1800s, early 1900s, the warbler population just started plummeting. This huge drop. By 1971, there are only 200 males on Earth. Whoa. So what do you do? Are you asking me? Mm. I guess. You gotta kill the cowbirds. Exactly. This is one of 54 traps. It's a new one that we just built this year, which is why we're out in this cage. It's actually a cowbird trap. Oh, she just bite me. Yeah, she'd bite me just like anyone. If you get someone larger grabbing you, they don't appreciate it too much. Anyone know how to kill them? I kind of do. Yeah. Thoracic compression is the term we use. We basically squeeze the bird, suffocating it, preventing it from breathing. Just with your hands. There's no. Yep. Yeah. Do you have to do that? Yeah, like all the time. Yeah. Did you see this? No, but. 1972, Fish and Wildlife Service sets up a bunch of traps. A few years and about 12,000 dead cowbirds later. It works. Kinda. The population stopped dying off, but then it didn't start bouncing back. What's going on? Yeah. Why aren't we seeing bigger numbers now that we're catching the cowbirds? That's Rita Halbison. She worked with the Forest Service back in the 80s. And we thought, well, we finally concluded it must be just there is not enough habitat. Like they don't have enough trees. Is that what you. Well, no, there are plenty of trees, but the thing about warblers is they like a Specific kind of tree. They like them very young. That was weird. I could feel it as I was saying it. They like them young. No, but they like young trees is what you're saying. Yep. And there aren't young trees in this place? No. It's really weird when. When they started looking around this forest, they noticed all the trees were really, really old. Why. Why wouldn't there be young trees? Well, us only you can prevent forest fire. Hey, hey, Smokey Bear. See, when humans began to settle in this area of Michigan in about the 1880s, they brought with them that certain human disdain for fire. Only you can prevent forest fires. But fire is exactly what's needed up there to make new trees. Yeah, this ecosystem is a fire ecosystem, says Chris. It burns because when these trees burn, they release their seeds and make room for new trees to grow. It is a fire ecosystem. It is made to burn. So I ask you again, what do you do? Do you start fires? Would that be the solution? That would be the solution. So the forestry started doing what we call a prescrib, Basically, says Rita. They burned down a little patch of forest, a few acres to regenerate it. And one windy spring day in 1980, at a place called Mack Lake, the forestry service started a fire that they probably shouldn't have. Okay. My name is Dick Lord. At the time of the Mack Lake fire, I was part of the ignition crew for the prescribed burn. What is an ignition crew? They light the fire. So at 10 in the morning, Dick and his crew go out into the woods, went out with a plan, start setting up perimeters, and they begin lighting a few stands of shrub. I was driving home. That's Bob Burner, Best name ever for a firefighter. I could see forest service starting to do a burn, and I thought, this is not a good time. It was windy. They didn't have the manpower. And I said, we'll probably be getting called out here shortly. Basically, we did not realize that the weather was going to change as rapidly as it did. The wind came up suddenly, something nobody could predict. And it took the fire across the road into a stand of mature jack pine and took off. There were flames probably 100, 150ft in the air. The sound is like a roaring trail. The forest guys jump into their bulldozers, trying to plow trenches alongside the fire to pinch it off. And, I mean, you could feel the heat. It was way out of our control, hitting the tops of the trees, rolling. I knew at the rate it was traveling that it was going to be a major catastrophe. Within six hours, it had burned over 20,000 acres. It's one of the fastest moving fires ever documented. Yeah, it went through here. As far as you can see, it was all black. These are two guys. Hi, Bob. Own houses in the area that got burnt. Remember the guy down there in the corner garage was all burned up, black, charred. Their houses were okay, but 41 houses were destroyed all the way up to the lake. It's just completely. Yeah, nothing green like something out of a moonscape. As far as you can see, everything gone. And the worst part about it for all of us. Let's Rita Helbison again was that it killed one of the forest service employees, a very young wildlife technician who was very well loved by his co workers, a guy named Jim Swiderski. You know, Jim was a good friend as well as an employee. Dick Lord again, Jim's boss, he told me that Jim had been a postman for a few years, but just loved birds so much that he took a huge pay cut to come and help protect the warbler. Basically what happened was. The fire overran him. Oh, the press was having a heyday, just tearing into the Forest Service for what had happened. The townspeople were very angry at the Forest Service. How could you do this? Rita says they were told not to wear their Forest service uniforms in town. Gosh, it was so terrible. And the forest itself, you know, there was nothing there. It was completely silent. But a year later, a little bit of green started to poke up. And the next year, a little bit more. And eight to ten years after that mack like burn just seemed like everywhere you turned around, you'd stop for listen. Now there were five or six birds, a tremendous number of warblers. That was the answer to the mystery, the fire. You know, if you look at a population graph, that's Chris Mensing again. After that Mack Lake burn, population went like that. He points his hand straight up. So it's pretty dramatic. And today the numbers are up to almost 4,000 birds. Ah, there he is. Yeah, and growing, Singing like crazy now that the birds are back. But a man is gone. When you walk around this town, a question lingers in the air. Is the life of a fireman worth the life of a bird? Oh, take a look. Take a look. Is it? That's incredible. Got him. I got him. Got him. No, in my opinion, it isn't. This is Ed Fawcett. I wouldn't trade your life for a bird. I'm sitting with him and his wife Mary Jane. Amen. Amen. In a diner. And no matter where you go in this town, what's the government doing? People don't tend to be huge fans of the warbler. It's just a small bird. And I've been up here since 68. I've never seen one. Did you ever see one? No, never have I seen one. I've never seen one, no. And back. I just gotta say to you, what would you think about it if your father or brother were killed for a bird? Be pretty hard to accept, wouldn't it? But if you zoom out one human life versus the end of a species. You know how many warblers there are in the United States? There's something like 37 species of warblers. The real number is actually closer to 60. That's kind of ridiculous. And that's not all they ask you, when are you done? And we really say never. Chris explained to me that they have to keep killing the cowbirds and they have to keep doing burns, smaller burns. But every single year, if we let things be, the bird would be extinct. That's the hard thing about this job, is knowing that we're never done. How many people are working, how much? You're probably looking at hundreds of people. Well over million dollars a year spent. And all this began to really sink in on one of my last mornings out there. All right, it is five in the morning. It was the annual Kirtland warbler census, where birders from all over the world show up to help count how many warblers there are out there. Is it like there's a warbler? Step, step, step, step. There's a warbler. Yeah, that's actually exactly how it works. I was paired up with this guy, Dave Mendez. We're gonna kind of walk through the middle of these transects. We're gonna come up. He's kind of a dude, dude. He's an older guy, got a beard. I work for an electrical contractor. Told me he's got a man room. Man room. You know, most guys got sports, but I've got Kirtland's warbler pictures up on the wall. Nice. So I went into it thinking, like, this will be really cool. We'll march along, we'll count them. I looked at the map. It was a mile, maybe of a walk. We'll be done in 20 minutes. Well, okay, maybe not. We're walking through the forest. An hour tops, and. Hey, Dave. We set off. Dense, brambly forest, still dark. Is that one. That was a hermit thrush. Okay, let me just play you a quick little time lapse. 20 to 7. Right now the sun's just coming up and it's getting a little muggy out here. That was a kirtlands. Oh, yeah, yeah. We can't count him, though. He's not in our section. 7:07. I heard one way back. That way. Yeah. There he is again. But I'm not gonna mark him in because I don't know exactly where he's at. 7:33. There he goes. Yeah. Yep, right there. So do you count him out? No, no, no, no. We want to be a lot more accurate. We want to triangulate them. 9, 56. And all's well in the warbler woods. A couple of ants are biting me. Yeah, they hurt, don't they? They do a little bit, yeah. Get out of there. 10:45am I know that there's a bird out there. I can still hear that bird way back there. So we end up staying out there for seven and a half hours. I just marked one, right? Yep. I've only marked one. And I don't mean to sound like I'm making fun of Dave. I mean, he's doing his job well. But at some point, in between the fire ants and taking four hours to confirm this one bird, he's gonna be right off over here. I just started thinking about all the effort it takes. Two rows of trees over from us and we can't see them. I just suddenly thought, it's this fussy, fragile little bird and it hasn't evolved. Who cares? I mean, this is not worth it. And so I started asking people, who protect the bird, why do it? So much money, and it's all for a bird. And I could see it maybe if it was for some, but it's just one warbler of 18 million different kinds of warblers. Like, why do it? Well, we do it because we should. You know, we're stewards of the land. That's Chris Mensing again. Cowbird killer. It's for future generations. And here's the fire starter, Dick Lord. You know, the Kirtland's warbler was listed under the Endangered Species act, and we had a charge under the law to do what we could to recover its existence. And that's the only thing that I can say that, you know, we had to do what the law required us to do, so we should do it, and the law tells us we have to do it. Unconvincing. And that question, the life of a fireman worth the life of a bird. And that guy Ed at the diner, it just stuck in my mind. And I Realized I couldn't leave this town until I talked to the people who lost the most. Can I just get you to introduce yourselves? Yeah, sure. Robert Swyderski, age 54. Kathleen Swiderski. Florence Swiderski. The mother. Mother. And the mother. The guy who died. Yeah, I guess that's it. Want iced tea or water or anything? We're all sitting around the kitchen table. There's a lot of hot dogs and beer over there. Jim's brother in law is there too. So I'm Calvin, Calvin Debris. And I asked them to tell me about Jim. Quite a guy. Soft spoken, smart, quite a character. Yep, they told me. At first they were furious. They should have never ever sent him in there. Angry at the Forest Service, Angry about this bird. Very angry. Now, three decades later, I say you keep that little bird going. Exactly. Really. Jim's younger brother Robert said that the thing he wanted the most is for the Kirtlands warbler to become the state bird. That would be the ultimate. That would be the biggest accomplishment ever, would be that being a state bird. Wow. I guess I'm. I'm. I guess in some ways I'm surprised. I. I didn't mean to come here with expectations, but in some ways I thought if it was my family, that I would hate that bird, but I would just hate that bird. No, it's not the bird. I mean, that bird didn't do anything to any of us. You know, if we can keep it going, I mean, that's what he set out to do. Let's keep it going. They think about Jim's death like the death of a soldier. Where would you be sitting right now if we wouldn't have lost all those soldiers in World War I, World War II, that he died protecting us? You know, it's only one species. Well, then it's going to be another species and another species and another species. Next thing you know, you walk out in the morning and it'll be quiet. Thank God for Teddy Roosevelt and the boys that made our national parks imagine. What if we didn't have those? It costs money. It's painful, blah, blah, blah. You gotta have the guts to do that. And Jim was really that kind of guy. Well, that is convincing. Yeah, but I mean, do you agree, Florence? Then I ask the mom. But can and I say the birds are coming back, but the life is gone, so why bring it up again? It's done. You can't bring it back, so you have to live with it. But there's always a hole in your heart. Something that none of us will ever forget forever. Don't ask me any more questions. Questions, please. And then again. Oh, the power went out. Give me a break. Go home and get the generator. I think we're done. Pretty dark. Lulu Miller if you want more information on Warblers or anything, or if you want to subscribe to our podcast, go to Radiolab.org Hey Radiolab, this is Gretchen Korsmo and I'm sitting in Oakland, California, looking out over beautiful Lake Merritt. Radiolab is supported by, in part by the National Science foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan@www.sloan.org. radiolab is supported by Rippling Finance teams often spend weeks chasing receipts, reconciling spreadsheets, and fixing errors across disconnected spend tools. This can be frustrating. And that's not software as a service, that's sad software as a disservice. 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I'm Alex Hongle, professional rock climber and founder of the Honl Foundation. I wanted to let you know about a brand new season of the Planet Visionaries podcast in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. This is the podcast exploring bold ideas and big solutions from the people leading the way in conservation. Join me in conversation with the likes of climate champion Mark Ruffalo, biologist and photographer Christina Mittermeier, and one of the most successful conservationists of our time, Chris Tompkins. Join us on Planet Visionaries wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jad. And I'm Robert. And the topic remains Oops. Final oops coming up. It's sort of a double oops. I would say we start with an oops that leads to another oops that then self negates. It comes to us from a fellow who, within the confines of the show, we will call Oopsie Wheeler. So maybe we could just start with both of you kind of introducing yourself and saying who you are and what you do. I mean, just something basic. Hi, I'm Andrea Sterley. Oh, me, I'm Donald Sterling. This is Don and Andrew Sterling. They're chemists. They're actually a research team here at University of Montana, and they met back in the 70s, back in 1979 at the University of California in San Diego. We met and almost fell in love at first sight. We dated for a week. He proposed, I accepted, they got married, and not long after, Don got offered a job. So they left their home in sunny California. Mind you, we lived about half. Half a mile from the ocean. Nonetheless, they packed up a truck with all of our stuff, including about 200 plants, and they moved to Butte, Montana, which is a different thing altogether. An old mining town that barely had a tree in the city limits. I don't know if you want to know Andrea's first impressions of Butte or not. Sure. I actually burst into tears and then started laughing. I think we call that hysteria. Yeah. The viewing stand used to be up on the hill over here when this was an operating pit. So I actually grew up in the town over from Butte in Montana. It's kind of that town that you were afraid to go to when you were a kid, filled with abandoned buildings, depressed. And actually, if you walk through town right there, right next to the middle of town, I don't remember exactly where it was. I remember being is this enormous open wound on the hill, like, oh, wow. This. This deep pit. This is where the pit is, the Berkeley pit. The guy saying wow is Barret Golding. I actually, I couldn't get back to Butte myself, so I asked Barret to go over there and visit with a couple of engineers. So tell. Tell me who you are. Okay, well, I'm Joe Griffin, Montana Department of Environmental Quality. And I'm Nick Tucci. I'm with the Montana Bureau of Mines and Geology. And the three of them are standing at the edge of the pit, which is kind of hard to imagine, especially the size of this thing. But when you're at the edge of the pit and you look down in, what you actually see is how can you convey what we're seeing? This enormous lake kind of. Well, it's 40 billion gallons of water, which is a lot of water. It's one of the larger lakes in the United States just carved into this hill. Yeah. The main difference though, between this lake and one that you might decide to take an afternoon dip in is that this lake is a bizarre. The color of the water is red, this kind of sickly red. And also greens and grays and black. Black. It's technicolor. It shimmers in this way that, like, words can't describe. And when you're standing there, you can't help but wonder. The question I really have, and I'll rephrase it after I ask it, because it's not quite is like, what the happened? I don't think that's gonna air. I mean, what happened? Well, it's just, you know, the price of copper. In the 1920s, when we were stringing up telephone wires and electrical wires and going through world wars, a third of the copper in the US Came out of this hill. You know, the long and the short of it is you wouldn't be standing here broadcasting this or recording this without copper in your wire right there. And in its heyday, you know, before the pitt was even around, Butte was this mining boom town. But by the 19, in the 1940s, the price of copper had dropped. A company that owned all the mines in Butte wasn't doing so well, and so they figured it'd be cheaper and easier to just blow the top off the hill. But things just kept getting worse. And by 1982, right around the time when Don and Andrea were coming to town, the mines completely shut down when they shut the pit in early 1980s. But here's the thing. While they're actually mining, they keep all the groundwater pumped out of there so that it's dry and they can work. And when they shut the mines down, they shut off the pumps. The company turned off the pumps. I think it was Earth Day 1982. Yeah, on Earth day. After that, the pit started filling up with groundwater. And it took a good 10 years to actually see a kind of a rust colored puddle in the bottom of the pit itself. But it was a puddle that was growing and growing and growing and growing. Now here's the thing about that water. The rock around the pit is filled with pyrite. And when the water hits the pyrite in the air, the three react to create sulfuric acid. Uh oh. In turn, that's Edwin Dob, freelance writer, had been for about 20 years, who actually grew up in Butte. The sulfuric acid hastens the removal of the metals from the ore itself, like gold. And Silver and copper, copper, cadmium, zinc, iron, sulfate, arsenic. And what you end up with is this toxic, acidic disaster. And it's still rising. In fact, you know, since we started working on this piece, Jed, it's risen like about a foot. There was an incident, infamous incident in the mid-1990s. Anybody who grew up anywhere near Butte knows this story. One stormy night, some 340 snow geese landed. They landed on the water looking for shelter. And they, of course, drink some of it. The next day, there were 342 goose carcasses floating on the water. They were all dead. And the autopsies showed lesions in the esophagus throughout the digestive system. So it's like the water ate their insides. Yeah. Were you struck at all, like, upon arriving there? Did you actually kind of go visit the mine? The old mine site. Avoided it like the plague. We were two staunch environmentalists, and the idea of living in a mining town was so complex, completely foreign. And when they first showed up in Butte, Don and Andrew, they were kind of struggling to fit in at the university because they're trying to study this little microorganism sponge in Bermuda. But they're in Butte, landlocked Butte, Montana. To make matters worse, when they took off for a year on sabbatical, our college accidentally unplugged our refrigerator, destroying all of our samples. Oh, my God. Desperation, definitely. We had no funding. We decided we just needed to start over. But one day, a scientist named Bill Chatham came into their lab with a piece of wood. And on this wood, there was some green, slimy stuff. He says, you won't believe this, but I found this stick with the slime on it in the pit, floating about a foot below the surface of the water. Now, here's the thing. I mean, that lake, this is like. This is the most deadly place you can imagine. I mean, nothing grows here. Nothing should grow here. Nothing. Absolutely not. Not even anything, but nothing. Yeah. What's less than nothing? Maybe absolute nothing. Like negative numbers of nothingness. It's more than nothing. It's an active getting rid of thing. It's a negating nothingness. You know how there's love and hate? This is not a lack of love. This is hate. Okay. But they got together with some college, they looked at the slime, and they realized against all odds, this stuff was alive. Life and acid mine waste. Life that no one had ever studied before. It really is what started. Everything we've been doing now, gosh, for the last 15 years so far, we found virtually hundreds of comps, compounds Organisms that we're growing, organisms that make molecules that can fight viruses. Several turn out to be good in our anti cancer screens. They fight cancer. Really? Yeah. So we have Berkeley Acid and Berkeley Amides and the Berkeley Acetals. They've now published tons of papers. I mean their work has just taken off, so it's been pretty exciting research. But then they told me this story that totally took them by surprise. It was about a year after they'd first started looking at the pit water. We found this sort of a sticky, opaque, thick, gooey black organism. Then they noticed that weirdly, if you put this little guy into a thing of the water from the pit, it actually absorbs the metals in pit water. What does that mean? Like they're taking the metals out of the water, they become little metal sponge. Yes, but so they're cleaning the water is what you're saying? Yeah, and there's lots of people that work with microorganisms to try to clean up metal laden water. But usually these things take in maybe like, I don't know, 10, 15% of the metals. This little guy will actually absorb between 85 and 95%. Whoa. So they got really curious about it and they started trying to figure out where it had ever been seen before. We had it identified and they eventually discovered that the only place this yeast had ever been found was where? Well, in the rectal swabs of geese. Ah, you mean like the snow geese that landed on the water? Yeah, the geese left a little, a little something behind. Wow. A present. Soren Wheeler. More information@radiolab.org my name is Don Sterling and Radiolab is produced by Jad Abarad and Soren Wheeler. Our staff includes Ellen Horn, Lulu Miller, Michael Rayfiel, Brenna Farrell, Pat Walters, and the one and only Tim Howard. With help from Sharon Shattuck, Raymond Tungakar, Cole Curry and Sam Rodman. Special thanks to Barrett Golding, Phil Huber and the whole Huber family. And Aaron Sands. There you go. I hope I haven't made too many mistakes.