LULU MILLER: We're starting to get our groove, and the boys are—yeah, I will tell you more about it when we don't have a clock running, but ...

LATIF NASSER: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, okay, okay.

LULU: Okay, so—okay.

LATIF: Yeah, okay. Well, we should say this is Radiolab. I'm Latif Nasser.

LULU: And I'm Lulu Miller.

LATIF: And you have been on maternity leave, and you still are on maternity leave.

LULU: [laughs]

LATIF: But for some reason, you have come back for a minute.

LULU: I'm emerging from the pajama land of maternity leave.

LATIF: [laughs]

LULU: Because I have some news. I have some exciting news, which is that Terrestrials is back!

LATIF: Ba-da-ba-dah!

LULU: Yeah, we've got—we've got a whole new season of our family-friendly nature show. Just dropped, it is just out. Seven new episodes.

LATIF: Wow!

LULU: Seven new romps through nature, seven new wild stories.

LATIF: Yeah, with, like—but, like, with animal and historical and scientific detours that are—yeah.

LULU: And musical detours.

LATIF: And musical detours.

LULU: Mm-hmm.

LATIF: Most of all.

LULU: Through all kinds of—you know, we got an episode about squirrels coming up, we've got an episode about deep-dwelling sharks, we've got an episode about lichen. [laughs]

LATIF: Mmm. I'm liking it.

LULU: So yeah, so that's what I'm here to tell you. If you like nature ...

LATIF: And how often and where—where do they find it and how often does it come out?

LULU: Okay, you head on over to the Radiolab for Kids feed, where there is stuff coming out all the time, basically every other week. Right now we've got—that's ramped up a little, we got stuff coming out every week. And you just look for the Terrestrials episodes. And if you make your way through those, there's other goodies waiting there. And that, again, the Radiolab for Kids feed, and there will be stuff on all year. Like, and all kinds of surprises coming out throughout the year.

LATIF: That's so great! I'm so excited! Congratulations. But also, you have something you are presenting to us right now.

LULU: Yeah. No, right. I guess to celebrate, we are gonna give you a taste of the first one, which just came out.

LATIF: It's so fun. It's such a fun episode. I mean, it's like you've—you've made something dead alive, which I think is like—is so fun to listen to.

LULU: It's a thing that seems dead, but maybe is less dead than we think.

LATIF: Hmm.

LULU: Yeah, so take a listen.

[RADIOLAB INTRO]

LULU: Three, two, one!

AMANDA THOMSON: Imagine you're standing in the middle of a forest. Your arms break off, and your insides hollow out.

LULU: Your skin turns hard and rough.

AMANDA THOMSON: Humans think of you as being dead, like a ghost.

LULU: But the birds and insects and rodents know the truth about you.

AMANDA THOMSON: Inside, you're brimming with life.

LULU: You birth babies.

AMANDA THOMSON: You fight fire.

LULU: You can even catch time. You have become ...

AMANDA THOMSON: A stump.

LULU: [laughs] Now is the part where I make you sing the theme song with me!

AMANDA THOMSON: Oh God! Okay.

LULU: [singing] "Terrestrials. Terrestrials. We are not the worst we are the ...

AMANDA THOMSON: Best?

LULU: "Bestrials." Yeah! You got it!

AMANDA THOMSON: [laughs]

LULU: Terrestrials is a show where we uncover the strangeness waiting right here on Earth. I am your host, Lulu Miller, joined as always by my songbud ...

ALAN GOFFINSKI: Hoo hoo hoo.

LULU: Alan!

ALAN: It's the Stumpisode!

LULU: [laughs] And this season, we are looking at things that are usually ...

ALAN: Overlooked! Shh!

LULU: And today's guide through the wild world of tree stumps is Scottish artist, writer and tree expert, Amanda Thomson.

AMANDA THOMSON: I don't see myself as being an expert on trees. I'm maybe more a lover of trees.

LULU: Now Amanda grew up like most of us, not really noticing stumps. Or if she did, noticing what they weren't.

AMANDA THOMSON: Trees are for climbing, aren't they?

LULU: Can't build a treehouse in a stump. Can't get shade from a stump.

AMANDA THOMSON: No!

LULU: So stumps seemed like broken things, sad things, dead things. Until one day, she happened across a stump that would cast a sort of spell on her that would make her see these quiet, dead-seeming stumps, completely differently.

AMANDA THOMSON: They don't look like they're doing anything, but they're doing so much.

LULU: All right. So like most good fairy tales, this one begins in the woods—the deep dark woods of Scotland. Amanda is staying in a friend's cottage, taking care of the chickens, and one day she decides to go for a walk in the ancient pines. She walks deeper and deeper into the dark, until suddenly a stump catches her eye.

AMANDA THOMSON: It was very pale. A lot of bark had fallen off of it, so it was almost silver.

LULU: It was a kind of stump called a snag, where part of the tree still stands, but it's hollow inside.

AMANDA THOMSON: All of the upper branches had snapped.

LULU: And as she studied its kinda spooky form, the giant stump began casting its spell.

AMANDA THOMSON: I just started to notice all these dead trees in the middle of all the life that was going on.

LULU: And without really knowing why, she got out her camera and began taking pictures!

AMANDA THOMSON: They're almost like skeletons.

LULU: Can you say any more about what drew you to them at the beginning?

AMANDA THOMSON: I was just drawn to their difference.

LULU: She related to that feeling.

AMANDA THOMSON: So when I was growing up, I was about the only Black kid in a small town. I had such a lovely childhood, but there's moments where you are made to feel different, you know? And you experience racism. And whether it's intentional or unintentional, you still feel it.

LULU: Hmm.

AMANDA THOMSON: So when I was starting to look at the dead trees and trying to think about what they meant for me ...

LULU: They reminded her a little of her, and she wanted to extend a kind of care to them that she didn't always get as a kid.

AMANDA THOMSON: There's a lot of kindness that comes when people start to understand the value of difference and what difference can contribute, if that makes sense.

LULU: Hmm.

LULU: And so she kept spending time with these dead trees, trying to get to know them by taking pictures of them.

AMANDA THOMSON: They're beautiful shapes.

LULU: And drawing them.

AMANDA THOMSON: Made some films.

LULU: Of dead trees. Etchings of dead trees. Sound recordings of you guessed it ...

AMANDA THOMSON: Dead trees.

LULU: [laughs]

LULU: But her understanding of the value of stumps really clicked in when she started following scientists on walks through the woods. They peeled back the bark, so to speak, and showed her just how many ...

AMANDA THOMSON: Different beasties that are there.

LULU: Beasties like beetles and wasps and mushrooms and flies!

AMANDA THOMSON: They hold so much life within them.

LULU: The scientists taught her there is a whole class of creatures that need stumps to live. They're what's called ...

AMANDA THOMSON: Saproxylic.

LULU: Saproxylic?

AMANDA THOMSON: Uh-huh.

LULU: It means they would die without dead wood. These are creatures like fungi that slurp up crucial nutrients out of stumps kind of like a wood smoothie. Or beetles lay their babies inside. Or wasps that chew stumps to create nests. And sometimes stumps break apart to create whole new worlds.

AMANDA THOMSON: Sometimes in the holes, like, you can get water as well, so that creates another microhabitat.

LULU: Oh! Like a little pool, a little pond in the dead tree?

AMANDA THOMSON: Yeah!

LULU: Hah!

LULU: And while wasps or beetles might sound kind of annoying, without them you'd lose pollinators, and little magicians that turn rot into crucial nutrients for the forest floor. And you'd lose food! Crunchy snacks for bigger creatures! In short, without stumps and deadwood, the forest ecosystem would pretty quickly collapse.

AMANDA THOMSON: Studies reckon that a healthy forest needs 30 percent dead wood in order to be a healthy forest.

LULU: Whoa, that is so much of the forest!

AMANDA THOMSON: Absolutely.

LULU: But Amanda was just getting started. She would go on to spend the next 20 years studying stumps.

AMANDA THOMSON: Yeah!

LULU: And is now gonna take us on a Tour de Stumps, a world tour of stumps doing things I would never dream they could: saving lives, creating cities, and even changing the sky.

AMANDA THOMSON: That's brilliant, isn't it?

LULU: The tour departs the station right after this short break.

LULU: Terrestrials is back, and I am lacing up my hiking boots for a Tour de Stumps—three stumps hidden on our planet that aren't famous, but totally should be.

AMANDA THOMSON: Uh-huh.

LULU: That's our stump lover, Amanda Thomson.

LULU: Okay Amanda, where are you taking us for stump one?

AMANDA THOMSON: We're going to Illinois.

LULU: Rural Illinois to meet a stump that changed the sky!

LULU: I'm somewhere in southern Illinois. I'm looking out at a bunch of windmills, just do-do-do-do-do ...

LULU: Once Amanda revealed the location, I hopped in my car and drove for hours.

LULU: A lot of fields.

LULU: Through flat, kinda dry-looking industrial bean farms and corn farms. Until ...

LULU: Oh!

LULU: ... I turned off onto a little dirt road, to meet with a firefighter ...

LULU: Hey, it's great to meet you.

LULU: ... named Tyler Funk who, well, discovered this stump.

LULU: So we are approaching stump.

TYLER FUNK: We're close.

LULU: We walk for a while on the mud and sprouts of a bean farm, until ...

LULU: Yeah, it's kind of gnarled and almost black. Really dark brown.

LULU: ... we reach a huge stump. It's up to my shoulders.

LULU: It's very typical, like, pretty flat-top. Little bit of bird poop on it. [laughs]

LULU: Now Tyler, like Amanda, didn't think he cared about stumps! He was way more into ...

LULU: That's a lot of birding gear!

TYLER FUNK: Yeah.

LULU: Do you have binocs?

LULU: ... birding!

TYLER FUNK: They're in here.

LULU: Oh yeah, big ones! Cool!

LULU: On his way to the fire station many mornings, he would get up early and pull off onto the side of the road to quietly observe little birds that came out of the brush.

TYLER FUNK: Sparrows!

ALAN: And sweet little warblers and finches, flitting about in their natural habitat.

LULU: And then one day in 2010, he saw something very out of place. A prairie falcon! Now allow me a brief aside to tell you how prairie falcons are the goblins of the sky. Most raptors shoot down from above and grab their prey in their talons. But a prairie falcon ...

TYLER FUNK: It's going so fast, and it punches something with its fists and it can just–I don't want to be morbid–but it can just basically disintegrate, you know, what it hits.

LULU: Oh, so it doesn't grab, it just punches?

TYLER FUNK: Yes. It's just like hitting it with a hammer.

LULU: Whoa!

ALAN: Gnarly!

LULU: Now for Tyler's half a century of birding, he had never seen a prairie falcon in Illinois before. Those birds preferred the American West, where there were tons of jagged cliffs and boulders off of which they could perch and hunt prey. So for years, Tyler and some other birders kept scanning the sky, wondering if they'd see it again. And every now and then over the years, they did. And slowly, carefully, they tracked it to its home base, which was ...

ALAN: Doo-de-doo-doo-doo!

LULU: This stump. This huge stump in the middle of a farmer's field. In early mornings, Tyler would sit in his car near the stump, and like magic, the falcon—so rarely seen in these parts—would appear from the sky.

TYLER FUNK: You could just watch him stretching his wings, you know, yawning.

LULU: And hunting. The stump made the perfect perch for the falcon to scan for prey.

TYLER FUNK: Oh yeah.

LULU: Tyler was amazed by the stump. But he had, you know, fires to fight. So he asked the farmer if he could set up a camera so he could monitor the stump 24/7. And that's when things got even weirder, because it wasn't just a falcon coming.

TYLER FUNK: I have footage of a snowy owl sitting on the stump, raptors, kestrels, Cooper's hawk, red-tailed hawk, rough-legged hawk.

LULU: Whoa!

LULU: And it didn't stop there.

TYLER FUNK: Coyotes have been up there. So they've had to pretty good jump to get up there.

LULU: Yeah!

TYLER FUNK: I think I've had a skunk up there, a weasel, a mink, rats, possums, and there's mice that come out and crawl around on that stump.

LULU: It's almost like a fairytale where the stump was a kind of magnet that pulled rare beasts from the sky and below.

TYLER FUNK: Actually, this winter I had a bobcat on top of that.

LULU: What?

TYLER FUNK: Yeah, I really didn't expect to see that.

LULU: [laughs]

LULU: Tyler's theory is that those huge, flat, bean-and-corn farms in Southern Illinois, well, as much food as they might produce for us, they don't have much to offer the other critters of the Earth.

TYLER FUNK: We're looking at basically scarred earth that's—all you can see is dirt. There's—there's really no biodiversity out here.

LULU: Huh, so it's kind of like a desert out here?

TYLER FUNK: I think actually a desert probably has better biodiversity than this does, to be honest with you.

LULU: It's worse than a desert. Okay.

TYLER FUNK: [laughs] It's worse than a desert, yeah.

LULU: But the stump in its way, is bringing life back. Its wood feeds bugs, which attract rodents, which hide in the roots, which attract bobcats and coyotes and even those rare raptors, which are now darkening the sky with wings that hadn't been seen in decades. Which is why Tyler and others now call it ...

TYLER FUNK: The magic stump.

LULU: Okay, so that was stump number one. Amanda, where is the next stump on our tour?

AMANDA THOMSON: We are going to Buckhannon, West Virginia.

LULU: [singing] West Virginia!

AMANDA THOMSON: [laughs]

LULU: And now apparently, we are gonna up the ante. We're gonna meet a stump that's not just a hotel for rodents and birds and coyotes, but ...

AMANDA THOMSON: Humans.

LULU: Humans?

AMANDA THOMSON: Yeah.

ANA GONZÁLEZ: So we're walking across a field, kind of like a soccer field. There's a little river to our right.

LULU: We sent the songbud Alan and producer Ana to go check it out.

ANA: There it is!

ALAN: [laughs]

ANA: Straight ahead is this large ...

ALAN: Big, wiry ...

ANA: Wiry, white?

ALAN: I love how this tree looks. Like, it looks old.

LULU: All right, so we are gonna roll back to the 1700s. The forest was dense with ancient oaks and spruces and maples.

GENE THORN: It was the absolute wilderness. Huge trees.

LULU: This is Gene Thorn, a wildlife biologist who is probably the world expert on this one particular stump.

GENE THORN: Yeah! [laughs]

LULU: And the story goes that running through the forest were two brothers who were trying to escape. So this was way back before the United States was a country, and the British were trying to colonize the land. And those two brothers were scouts in the British army, but they didn't want to fight anymore. So they'd abandoned their posts and ran into the forest as fugitives. And as they ran, they were looking for a place to hide from ...

GENE THORN: Copperheads, rattlesnakes, mountain lions.

LULU: And of course, the British army! They would be in huge trouble—like, executed trouble—if they were caught. And one day, these brothers ...

GENE THORN: Sam and John Pringle.

LULU: ... they came to the banks of a river, and they saw ...

GENE THORN: Well, that's where they found the hollow sycamore tree.

LULU: ... a massive hollow stump with bright white bark.

GENE THORN: It was over 11 foot high, 11 foot wide. It's the size of a bedroom in an apartment.

LULU: Wow!

LULU: So tentatively, they climbed inside.

ALAN: [climbing in] I can't believe how deep that goes.

ANA: I can't believe you're standing up right now.

ALAN: Oh, easy too! Like, I can put my arms straight up in the air and I am not touching the top.

LULU: And they liked it! It was warm, cozy.

ANA: It smells like a fresh forest floor.

ALAN: Yeah, well, it is.

LULU: So they decided to move in, and almost immediately began tricking out their stump.

ANA: Welcome to MTV Cribs: Stumps Edition!

ALAN: Today we got the Pringle brothers!

ANA: Let's check out ...

ALAN: This stump!

ANA: ... this stump!

ALAN: First we got the beds!

ANA: A mattress made of leaves! Layers of fur hides!

ALAN: Fuzzy!

GENE THORN: They used their hides for blankets.

ALAN: Mad cozy!

ANA: And check out this door!

GENE THORN: Made out of bark.

ALAN: Custom-made!

GENE THORN: Tanned skins to keep the winter weather out and so forth.

ALAN: Yo, and no stump is complete without a lit fireplace!

ANA: [laughs]

ALAN: For cooking up gamey stew!

ANA: Ooh! But where's all that smoke gonna go?

GENE THORN: A little opening at the top where the smoke went up and out. It's just like a chimney.

ANA: See ya next time!

LULU: [laughs] Wait, but so if you were to, like, walk through the forest, and you come across this giant 11-foot tall stump, and there'd be, like, a little—a little trail of smoke coming out the top?

GENE THORN: Yeah. So you'd have a smoky smell.

LULU: Okay, I'm picturing them in there. They've got, like, meat jerky hanging on the walls. Are wolves and bears and other critters not drawn to that smell?

GENE THORN: Now that's a really interesting question!

LULU: Because apparently one day a bear did attack! Well, after Sam had tried to shoot it.

GENE THORN: He had big, red eyes, and there were these snarls of saliva coming out of his mouth.

LULU: Gene, it turns out, is also a historical reenactor who will sometimes dress up as Sam Pringle and tell the legend of that bear attack as though he was Sam himself.

GENE THORN: "So I drew my knife out, and by that time he had hit me and got me down on the ground, and he was chewing on me."

LULU: Oh!

GENE THORN: "And I sunk that knife behind his shoulder. And I blacked out right then."

LULU: A few hours later ...

GENE THORN: "John, he found me."

[VOICEOVER: Samuel!]

GENE THORN: "Laying on the ground, and he had to literally carry me down off of the hill and into our tree. And he laid me down and put a blanket on me and tucked me up."

LULU: Good brother, John.

GENE THORN: Great brother.

LULU: Sam's little brother knew he was gonna have to hike hundreds of miles to the nearest town to find supplies. So he left Sam there all winter long, vulnerable, aching, the snow swirling outside, protected by the stump. And after months ...

GENE THORN: "I was running out of food. It was getting critical."

LULU: But then one glorious day ...

GENE THORN: "Back over the mountains, here came John, and he was refreshed with good news: the war was over, and so the British army was no longer looking for us."

LULU: So they were safe to move to a nearby town. Sam got married, they moved into a house, but after just a little bit of time, he realized he missed his stump! So he convinced his wife and some friends to return!

GENE THORN: Pioneers came over the mountain with him, and they all lived in that tree 'til they got their cabins built.

LULU: Wow!

GENE THORN: So there were several families actually that lived in there for a time period.

LULU: Whoa! So, like, how many people do you think in that one stump?

GENE THORN: About 10 to 12 people that would have been inside there. Yeah.

LULU: Oh, that's a tight pack.

LULU: The stump sheltered them as Sam Pringle and his friends built cabin after cabin, which would eventually turn into the city of Buckhannon, which now has over 5,000 people. And alongside the river that flows through the town is a park where the stump used to be. And right near it is a hollow sycamore tree that they have named the Pringle Tree!

ANA: All right, pass me a Pringle, Pringle.

ALAN: All right. We are in the Pringle tree and we are eating ...

ANA: Pringles.

ALAN: Pringles! Cheers.

ANA: Cheers!

[crunching chips]

ANA: They taste better in the tree.

ALAN: They taste better in the tree. They sound better in the tree.

ANA: Mm-hmm!

LULU: Alright. We have visited the magic stump that changed the sky, the Pringle stump that birthed a city. Amanda, where are we going for our final stump stop?

AMANDA THOMSON: We're going to Wales.

LULU: Wales, a small seaside nation in the UK, where in 2014, a mighty tempest rolled through. There was wind and fog and lightning. The waves swelled high into the sky.

AMANDA THOMSON: Very choppy.

LULU: But when the storm finally passed ...

AMANDA THOMSON: There arose from the water all these mysterious structures.

LULU: Dozens of black, pointy ...

AMANDA THOMSON: Protrusions that looked like shark's fins.

LULU: But upon closer inspection ...

AMANDA THOMSON: It turned out they were stumps.

LULU: Ha!

AMANDA THOMSON: Petrified snags and stumps.

LULU: Petrified, meaning hardened ...

AMANDA THOMSON: Fossilized.

LULU: ... into this forest of preserved deadwood, poking out from the sea. People came from all over to wander through these ghost trees. And as they did, they noticed that in the fossilized dirt, there were ...

AMANDA THOMSON: Human footprints of children and adults.

LULU: From more than 5,000 years ago!

AMANDA THOMSON: Scientists analyzed the footprints and learned that this area, which was deep underwater, used to be a human civilization.

LULU: And the wild part is this scientific data held in the stumps echoed an ancient legend from Wales—a sort of local fairytale about a great town that was swallowed up by the ocean! Now no one really knew if that story was true or not, but the stumps offered up a pretty good guess.

AMANDA THOMSON: I think there's a lot of histories if you start to pay attention to looking at a tree, and what you see in them.

LULU: Hmm.

ALAN: Toot, toot!

LULU: Well, that concludes Amanda's Tour de Stumps!

AMANDA THOMSON: It's just been so lovely spending time talking about stumps with you, Lulu!

LULU: Ah, it's been the best! And that was only three stumps out of all the stumps you've written about, out of all the stumps on the planet!

AMANDA THOMSON: Yeah!

LULU: There are also redwood stumps that kind of fight forest fire with their special thick bark, and stumps that shelter baby bats like woody nurseries. And a stump in Tanzania that keeps shooting out new life!

AMANDA THOMSON: [laughs] Yeah!

LULU: And there are probably so many more secrets and powers waiting in the dead-looking parts of the forest!

AMANDA THOMSON: Absolutely. I'm still learning. I haven't finished yet, but I don't know where I'm gonna go next.

[musical interlude]

S-T-U-M-P! S-T-U-M-P! S-T-U-M-P!

ALAN: [singing] If you're a stump or a snag, a fabulous dead wood, you make me glad the way only a stump could. I know there's more to you than meets the eye. No lie, you sure got me mystified.

ALAN: [singing] I try to get to the root of it, oh! I'm out on a limb, I can't leaf it alone. Hot shot, I wanna know what ya got. Dead wood, a-ha! I wanna watch ya rot.

S-T-U-M-P! S-T-U-M-P! S-T-U-M-P!

ALAN: [singing] One and two, tree, four. Hard-core arbor. A tree corpse on the forest floor. Check out the stump, thump thump. That's what I'm looking for. They say you're dead wood. I think you're kinda not, because you're full of life. Yeah you're so alive. What more could anybody want from the one and only S-T-U-M-P!

S-T-U-M-P! S-T-U-M-P! S-T-U-M-P!

LULU: [singing] A-L-A-N Goffinski! Alan Goffinski, everyone, bringing down the house with the materials that make the house: the wood, the stumps, the planks, the snags! And that's it! That is all that Terrestrials has to offer you today. There's nothing else cool about to happen.

LULU: [whispers] What's that?

BADGER: Excuse me, I have a question.

BADGER: Me too.

BADGER: Me three.

BADGER: Me four.

LULU: The Badgers! Listeners with badgering questions for the expert.

LULU: Are you ready?

AMANDA THOMSON: Yeah.

JOE: Hey, my name is Joe. I am 29 years old. My question is: does the stump know that the rest of the tree is gone?

AMANDA THOMSON: That's quite sad. And quite existential. Maybe it's just living its own moment.

ELISE: My name is Elise. I'm six years old. Can trees get Band-Aids for snags?

AMANDA THOMSON: You're gonna have to ask a scientist about that question.

LULU: Okay! Gene?

GENE THORN: Yeah, they can. There's people that make a living, they call themselves tree surgeons.

LULU: Huh!

GENE THORN: And if you get a broken branch off, you can actually go and wrap it up with a Band-Aid.

LULU: Wow!

GENE THORN: And kind of a tar-y-like substance goes underneath to keep the moisture from getting inside and causing rot.

LULU: Wow! I wonder if tree surgeons have to take a Hippocratic oak.

GENE THORN: [laughs]

SIYA: Hi! My name is Siya. I'm 12 years old. My question is: do bears scratch themselves on dead wood, or only on trees that are alive?

GENE THORN: For the most part, they choose live trees.

LULU: Huh!

GENE THORN: They're getting rid of their winter coat, so they'll rub up and down the tree and take that fur off. The other thing that happens is they're trying to rub and get ticks dislodged and off of themselves. And there's been some research that the oils of birch trees and pine resin are actually a tick repellent.

LULU: Smart! [laughs]

MARK: Hi! My name is Mark. I'm 33 years old, and I'm joined by ...

SOPHIE: Sophie.

MARK: And ...

CINDY: Cindy.

MARK: Ages five and two. And we'd like to know why do we say we are stumped when we run into a question we can't answer?

AMANDA THOMSON: Hmm. Is it because of the shape of the stump? You can't see the–kind of a way to branch off ...

LULU: Ah!

AMANDA THOMSON: ... of your thinking?

LULU: [laughs]

AMANDA THOMSON: I have been stumped!

LULU: Well, that is the most perfect place to leave it. Biggest thanks again to Amanda Thomson. If you would like to read her beautiful writing, check out her book, Belonging. There is a lot in there about tree stumps, other overlooked things—and people. And it's got a gorgeous painting of a hollow stumpy snag on the front. Again, that's Belonging, by Amanda Thomson.

LULU: Terrestrials was created by me, Lulu Miller, with WNYC Studios. This episode was produced by Ana González, Mira Burt-Wintonick, Alan Goffinski, Joe Plourde and me, with help from Tanya Chawla, Sarah Sandbach and Valentina Powers. Fact-checking by Natalie Middleton.

LULU: Support for Terrestrials is provided by the Simons Foundation, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, the Kalliopeia Foundation, and the John Templeton Foundation. Thank you!

LULU: And also wanted to give a big shout to the documentary, The Magic Stump. That is how I learned about Tyler Funk's stump. [singing] Tyler Funk's stump! Mrreow! In Illinois. It's a great documentary. Bob Dolgan is the filmmaker. You should go watch it. See all the raptors and beasts and humans that, you know, come pay homage to this stump. That again is called The Magic Stump.

LULU: Finally, teachers, we have free—free, free, free—teaching materials on our website that go along with many of the episodes. We worked with PBS Learning Media to make sure everything aligns with national standards. We've got them for grades K through 8. And they are free, and they are fun, and you can find them and print them out at RadiolabForKids.org.

LULU: If you are liking what you are hearing over here in Terrestrials, please like and subscribe to the podcast. It helps our chances of continuing on—like a tree stump—giving more life and audio stories to you. All right, that'll do it. Thanks so much for listening. Catch you in a couple spins of this dirty ol' planet of ours. Bye!

GENE THORN: Then in the summer, there's almost always a barred owl that you can hear from right here. And they make a sound that is "Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you all?" And I'll do you a little rendition of that. [owl hooting]

LULU: All right. That is all from me this week on here. I'm headed back to maternity leave, but if you want to hear more Terrestrials episodes, new ones are dropping for the next few months, check out the Radiolab for Kids feed and you'll see the Terrestrials episodes. You can listen to those, and if you make your way through those, there's other stuff. There's old Radiolabs about nature and about animals. And it's a family-friendly place you can go where you know it's gonna be G-rated and you're gonna get a story that will take you into the natural world and kinda hopefully make you see it really anew and where you might have some fun.

LATIF: And where you might get a song stuck in your head that you can't get out.

[ALAN: [singing] In deep, cold ocean we swim alone. A little misunderstood, but we're at home. Yeah, we may seem rough ...]

LULU: Yeah, and what's really fun this season—actually, I don't know if you know this, Latif, you might. But Alan, the Songbud Alan Goffinski who writes all the songs, he got really into collaboration and there's all these, like, rock stars on the songs this season. There's different episodes have different people, so ...

LATIF: Like who?

LULU: If you're into punk at all, Laura Jane Grace is a pretty big name. She's on one of them. Tasha, who's in the Sufjan Stevens musical that's out right now, Illinoise.

LATIF: Cool!

LULU: She was one of the main people. This really cool harpist Timbre. But yeah, so there's all kinds of different genres, gorgeous voices, gorgeous instruments coming in on the songs. I still unfortunately for listeners sing on a couple of them, but mostly it's talented musicians. [laughs] So yeah, there's good—there's great music, there's wild stories and we are very excited to share them with everybody.

LATIF: And you are—you are after this studio session, you are going back to the pajamas.

LULU: Running back to my baby.

LATIF: Right.

LULU: To feed the baby. Yes.

LATIF: The baby.

LULU: Yeah, I'm going back on maternity leave.

LATIF: And when do you come back?

LULU: And I come back in January.

LATIF: Yeah, that'll do it for today.

LULU: And then right on here we will return you to your regularly-scheduled Radiolab. More of that next week.

LATIF: Thanks for listening.

[LISTENER: Hi, I'm David and I'm from Baltimore, Maryland. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad, and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Rebecca Lacks, Alex Neason, Sarah Qari, Sarah Sandbach, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger and Natalie Middleton.]

[LISTENER: Hi, this is Ellie from Cleveland, Ohio. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.]

 

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