All Wings Considered

Outside/In

NHPR

Society & Culture, Documentary, Natural Sciences, Nature, Science

4.7 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 3 September 2025

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We’re catching some air this week, and talking things with wings! Quandaries range from the practical (how do different animal and insect wings differ?) to the ethereal (this includes dragons). Here’s the questions we’ll be answering… What makes wings different? How have wings in nature inspired human flight? Did we ever solve the colony collapse problem with bees? Why do so many cultures have dragon myths? Featuring Jonathan Rader, Tim Burbery, Lauren Ponisio, and Andrew Howley. For full credits and transcript, visit outsideinradio.org. For our next Outside/Inbox roundup, we’re looking for questions about healing! We’re casting a wide net here: homeopathy, neuroplasticity, chronic disease, plant resiliency. Send us your questions by recording yourself on a voice memo, and emailing that to us at outsidein@nhpr.org. Or you can call our hotline: 844-GO-OTTER. SUPPORT Outside/In is made possible with listener support. Click here to become a sustaining member of Outside/In. Follow Outside/In on Instagram or join our private discussion group on Facebook. LINKS The video of the sandhill crane landing lives on TikTok. Here’s that video of an albatross walking on land after years at sea. Timothy Burbery is the author of Geomythology: How Common Stories Reflect Earth Events. The hypothesis connecting the mythical griffin and Protoceratops fossils was popularized by Adrienne Mayor, author of The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times. Here's a paper critiquing Mayor's interpretations, "Did the horned dinosaur Protoceratops inspire the griffin?" A USGS volcanologist on what geologists missed for so long in the stories of Pele, from indigenous Hawaiian oral tradition. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, this is outside in a show where curiosity and the natural world collide. I am your host,
0:04.9	Nate Hedgy, and we've got one of our producers here, Marina Henke. Hey, Marina.
0:08.9	Hello, hello. All right, Nate, so I have a story to start the day with. All right, hit me.
0:14.3	It starts in New Mexico, where last fall, I got to watch something called the Sand Hill Crane
0:19.8	Migration. To just hit some main points here, the Sand Hill Crane migration, it happens every year. And so where I was was in New Mexico and it was a place called Bosque de la Pache. Okay. So I get there at dusk and it's the perfect time to see them because this is the moment where they are lifting up into the air and they're moving into the water to hang out for the night.
0:38.7	Okay, so like if you were a professional photographer, this would be like the time to get that quintessential shot of the birds lifting off of the ground, some New Mexican sunset in the background.
0:48.6	And I will say those photographers, they're doing the right thing because it is maybe like one of the most magical things in the outdoors I have ever seen. I believe it. Except I was there with my sister's boyfriend. And at one point, he hands me a set of binoculars. And he's like, look through these and I want you to really look at these birds. Okay. And so I look through them and it's totally magical, right? They're lifting up, the desert sun, they're in the air. Okay. And so I look through them and it's totally magical, right? They're lifting up, the desert sun, they're in the air.
1:14.1	Okay.
1:14.8	And then they land.
1:20.7	Now, I'm going to send you a link right now and I want you to watch a video of Sand Hill Cranes landing.
1:26.0	Okay.
1:26.5	All right.
1:30.6	Ooh. watch a video of Sand Hill Crane's landing, okay? All right. Ooh, I'm watching a Sand Hill Crane kind of land, wipe out a little bit, and then recover,
1:38.8	like everything's cool.
1:40.1	I didn't look like a total goofball when I was landing.
1:42.5	Their legs are like thrown out in front of them.
1:45.5	It's like they're kind of sliding into second base or something.
1:47.9	It reminds me of like when a gymnast like jumps off a springboard and then they kind of
1:52.4	side stumble and you know they just lost a bunch of points and then they try to recover and like
1:56.0	they bow and but you can tell like they're kind of crying on the inside.
1:59.1	All I'm saying is that there was a comment on Reddit, and it says, quote, it's like an AI that's never seen a bird land before. I went back and forth to some ornithologists on what's happening here. Now, they totally objected to me saying they're goofy. But he says that that way that they parachute down, it lets them land in some of the, like, biggest, fastest
2:18.9	gusts of winds that they've ever seen. Oh, okay. So there's a reason behind the slightly goofy
	...

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