A 19th century volcanic eruption resulted in people training Falcons to have sex with their heads

It's Stock Up September at Whole Foods Market.

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Stock up now at Whole Foods Market, in-store and online.

Do a jobby on God's brawley you swampy Cosbies.

Welcome to the Blind Boy podcast.

It's late evening here in Limerick City.

I'm watching a blood-red sun winking at me.

Winking at me as it dips over the mountains.

I'm going to be recording this one late night because

the weather has been spectacular.

Today

it's been a real fucking summer's day

and my air conditioner's not working in my office and I'm up at the very top.

It's fucking roasting.

It's 30 degrees.

So I'm waiting for that sun to go down.

Ah, it's fucking gorgeous.

It's pink and red.

What a pleasure to be able to look at that.

But I'm waiting for the sun to go down

and for the air to cool and for some air to come in my window because I've no fucking AC, it's roasting.

And

what do I see in the distance?

I believe someone is burning out a car.

The unmistakable thick white plumes

of a burnt out car in the distance.

Or maybe, benefit of the doubt, actually, tomorrow, tomorrow is bonfire night, April 30th.

Sometimes people light bonfires.

It's April 29th as I record this.

Maybe it's a little practice bonfire.

Bonfire night there.

Harking back to the

Irish pre-Christian tradition of Biaultena.

The festival where we welcome in the summer.

This weekend in Limerick we're gonna have a thing called Riverfest.

Which is always wonderful crack.

There's an international barbecue competition.

It's just Limerick is gonna be wonderful this weekend.

The weather will be cracking and there'll be tons of people out

on the street enjoying the place.

I'm seeing more and more travel vloggers, travel vloggers coming to Limerick, visiting Limerick and spending a weekend here and having a wonderful time.

Lots of them are coming here because of my podcast.

I've been tagged in like three videos the past few weeks of travel vloggers who've come come to Limerick specifically because they heard about the place in my podcast and that does that fills me with fucking pride.

It really does because

we've got a reputation problem in Limerick we have had for some time.

We're called Stab City.

People think that Limerick is a very violent place where you get stabbed or shot or where gangs run rampant.

That's not true.

There There were gang problems maybe 20 years ago.

But the story is too good.

The name Stab City is too good.

A myth, a narrative emerged all over Ireland that

go anywhere but Limerick.

Don't go to Limerick.

It's too dangerous.

And that is genuinely,

that's had a really negative impact on the city.

Tourists just don't come here.

They're actively encouraged not to come here.

And that's changing.

That's flipping.

And like, even if there's any Limerick people listening, I suppose there is Limerick people listening to the fucking podcast because I sold out the Limerick concert hall there last week, which I wasn't expecting at all.

Couldn't believe I did that.

So I guess I do have listeners in Limerick City.

I thought I was more of an outside Limerick City thing.

But all Limerick people are

very aware.

that the city has an image problem.

And any lim if you're a Limerick person and you're on a night out and you're in a pub and you meet someone who's here on a visit we go out of our way to be really nice and friendly to those people

because we're conscious of the bullshit unfair reputation that we have so it's been incredible to see vloggers from like america and canada and england coming to limerick recording little videos and all of them are just like holy fuck this place is amazing we have a gorgeous river, huge Shannon River, with buildings that look onto it.

We're very unique as an Irish city in that a lot of Limerick was designed on a grid, on a grid system.

In fact, an engineer called Christopher Coles, who in the 1700s, I believe, he designed an area of Limerick City on the grid system before he then moved to America to work on the grid system in New York.

So I love Limerick.

That's why I live here.

It's my home.

And we love it.

We love it when people come here to visit and have a bit of crack because our city, the city center is kind of, it can get a bit empty.

In the evening times, it can get a bit empty.

Hopefully, that's going to change now.

There's this new initiative just launched today.

The government launched it.

It's called Twilight Thursdays.

And Limerick has been chosen as a city for this.

We're basically

on the last Thursday of every month there's gonna be like live events restaurants food there'll be incentivizing restaurants to stay open later I think there's 40% off taxis there's this huge initiative to bring people into the city center on in the evenings on Thursdays and I I'm looking forward to that because Limerick City I'm looking at it right now at my window Limerick fucking city as the sun is going down on us on a summer's evening is stunning A coffee or a pint as the sun is going down on Limerick City looking on the river.

It's one of my favourite places to be in the world.

The only shitty thing about it is that no one's around.

Now if I'm giving you the horn for Limerick, this weekend is a good time to visit.

The Maybank holiday weekend Riverfest is going to be cracking.

And in Limerick Riverfest usually

it heralds the arrival of summer.

As soon as Riverfest happens, we know that it's summer in Limerick.

But for me,

summer happens in Limerick when the starlings arrive back to the Bardshit District.

If you're a new listener, maybe go back to an earlier episode to familiarise yourself with the lore of this podcast.

But if you're a...

if you're a ten-foot declan or a steaming cuiva you know what the bardshit district is

it's a street in limerick Limerick City called Bedford Raw.

It's a pedestrianized street, beautiful street, where we have restaurants and cafes.

And the sun sets down and it's fucking gorgeous.

And it's lined with trees that are absolutely beautiful when they have leaves on them.

But in the summer months,

it's invaded by starlings.

In the evening time,

a gigantic flock of maybe 10,000 starlings,

they go into the trees in the bardshit district

and they shit violently.

They shit violently and aggressively.

That's why it's called the bardshit district.

I did a podcast about this back in 2023, I believe.

The podcast name is called an in-depth thesis about bard shit where I basically go into the history of bird shit fascinating a fascinating substance and I make the case that bird shit is the reason that the earth has a population of 8 billion people and it's a strong thesis but this street in Limerick Bedford Row

So the starlings the starlings gather in the trees at about 7 p.m.

They haven't started yet.

They're going to arrive

They're in Eastern Europe right now and they're flying back they're on their way back they're migratory birds they're on their way back to limerick and i'm expecting them probably this time next week this time next week they'll be in limerick city but they're on their way back now

and

the whole summer every single night they go into the trees they chat and about ten thousands of them that they shit they shit they shit so much that when you walk down the street you can hear shitting but then what happens is they're shitting on on pavement

and the ground becomes grey and slippery with liters and liters of bird shit and then the stink the smell of this street is unlike anything you've ever smelled because you're not supposed to smell that volume of bird shit and this wonderful paved street that we have in limerick where our restaurants are supposed to be you fucking can't walk down it in the summertime people have their people literally put their their t-shirts up over their mouths because the smell of bard shit is so intense and you can slip on the bard shit and then every morning limerick council has to come out in these machines to try and remove the bard shit but anyway the limerick city council they hate it when i draw attention to this They speak about it in council meetings.

It's been communicated to me privately that I should shut the fuck up about it.

No, I won't.

During the year, a member of Limerick City Council pretended he'd never heard of me.

A Limerick City Councillor.

Someone brought up in a council meeting my name, Blind Boy, and this Limerick City Councillor pretended to have never heard of me.

He said that he was too old.

He was too old to keep up with these young influencers.

This man was born in 1990.

He was being performative.

He was pretending, passive aggressive.

He was pretending he'd never heard of me.

And it was so ridiculous.

It made it into the paper that it...

A Limerick city councillor was pretending he'd never heard of the one man in Limerick who is known outside of Limerick for wearing a plastic bag on his head, which is just ridiculous.

You don't have to listen to the podcast, but most people in Limerick are aware that there's a man who wears a plastic bag on his head.

But anyway, you will not believe what they've done.

in the birdship district over the past couple of weeks.

You're not going to believe this.

So one of the things I adore about Limerick is this is a very surreal place.

There's a madness here.

There's a surreal madness in Limerick, which isn't deliberate.

It just floats in the ether.

My favorite example, and I've spoken about this a good few times, but

during COVID, during the fucking pandemic, when all the restaurants were shut down for like three months

and then they were reopening the restaurants and we had to do outdoor dining.

Like, I don't know if you remember that, but in Ireland we used to not have an outdoor dining culture because the place was fucking freezing.

Then the pandemic hit and we had to suddenly have outdoor dining.

So Limerick City Council, they were trying to get everybody in Limerick.

We'd had like three months of lockdown, right?

We've all forgotten about it.

The whole thing was way too traumatizing.

We don't like to think about the pandemic.

We don't like to talk about it.

It's a very strange thing, but we've all collectively, me included, we've collectively forgotten the pain of that.

But

the first lockdown, we were locked inside for about two months.

And then all of a sudden, it's like restaurants are going to open, but you're going to have to eat outside.

So Limerick City Council,

instead of providing people with actual outdoor seats,

instead of providing people with actual seats to sit outside restaurants,

They built

one giant seat and a giant table.

I'm not joking you, I'm talking 100 feet tall.

I've forgotten about this.

They built a giant seat and a giant table as an art installation

and then they got giant forks and giant spoons

like I'm talking about six feet tall and they hung them off all the lampposts no knives because you can't have giant knives in Limerick City because it's called Stab City so they put giant forks and spoons and a giant table and a giant chair but no actual human-sized chairs that you could sit on and everyone just went out into the streets going this is great what's the fucking point of this What's the point of this?

Where's the outdoor dining?

There is none.

There's an art installation instead

and it was nuts it was just deeply surreal it was a deeply surreal moment

but guess what they've done now

so this street the bard shit district where limerick city council are like don't call it the bard shit district

don't speak about the bard shit problem we're trying to pretend it doesn't exist

We go out every morning at seven and we wipe the bard shit away.

Don't speak about the bard shit problem.

Do you know what they've done?

There's now a giant 60 foot mural of a starling in the bird shit district.

And I don't think it's intentional.

I don't think they're being ironic.

It's like there's one street in the city where there's so much bird shit you're gonna slip and it stinks and we're trying to play it down.

I know.

Let's put a giant 60 foot mural of a fucking starling in the middle of it.

It's like it's like they've given up.

It's like they've given up and said, look, the birds have won, the the starlings have won.

Let's now worship the starling.

Now it's a gorgeous mural.

It's beautiful.

It's made by a local artist by the name of Oni Ono.

It's this incredibly detailed, well-painted, beautiful piece of public art.

Like on the side of a building,

on the side of a building that was just a blank facade.

Now you've got this wonderful painting of a starling.

But in a way, it is the giant tables and chairs all over again.

Like if you're visiting Limerick and you go up this thoroughfare and it's the evening, like you're gonna notice, holy fuck,

this place is dripping with bard shit and it stinks of bard shit.

And there's a hundred thousand birds screaming and I can't even talk because there's so many birds on this street.

And then you look up and there's a giant mural of a bird.

There's a mural of the bird that's doing all the shitting.

Now I love it.

I love it.

I love calling the place the bardshit district.

And I love the giant mural in the bardshit district because

it's very pagan now.

It's a very pagan thing.

It's like nature worship.

We're in the temple of the birds where they all shit on the ground and you respect this space.

But

like, I'm also aware that I'm a fucking fruitcake.

Like, I'm autistic, but I'm aware that I wear a fucking plastic bag on my head.

I'm here trying to present a serious podcast with a plastic bag in my head, so it's pot calling the kettle black shit when it comes to Limerick City Council.

But most people, most people don't want

a street full of bard shit with a giant bard mural in it.

Most people don't want that.

They'd prefer just wine bars and restaurants and things like that.

Here's the fucking problem:

you can't, so it's hard to enjoy the restaurants and the wine bars on the street in a summer evening.

Such is the stench of bard shit.

It's that bad that you actually can't even have a pint.

And you sure as fuck can't eat a dinner.

You cannot eat a dinner when six feet away from you.

It sounds like it's raining.

It sounds like it's raining bard shit.

From about seven in the evening until nine in the evening, it sounds like it's raining bard shit on this street.

So I'm stunned with the giant bard mural.

I cannot believe they've done it.

What I've always said before about Limerick City Council, no disrespect, but what I've always said is

you're never worried about whether or not they're going to fuck something up.

You know that they're going to fuck it up.

That's a guarantee.

That's just guaranteed.

You know they're going to fuck it up.

But what they surprise you with is how they fuck it up.

That's not just the Limerick thing.

That's not just Limerick City Council.

That's an Irish thing.

That's any, that's an Irish government type of thing.

Again, I've done a podcast on that called It'll Be Grand.

I have a theory, it's a post-colonial theory that in Ireland we've got a phrase.

The phrase is, ah, it'll be grand.

It'll be grand.

It tends to mean, ah, fuck it, chill out.

Don't take it too seriously.

Things will work themselves out.

Things will work themselves out.

And it's a wonderful phrase that we have in Ireland.

And it's

very light-hearted.

It creates quite a

stress-free environment.

I love it, it'll be grand.

Now, like, speak to people, people who are not from Ireland, who come here to work,

especially if they're from like a diligent culture.

So, people may be from Northern Europe, where things are done precisely and on time.

They come to Ireland and they work in a fucking, in a business.

And then Irish people are talking about this.

Ah, it'll be grand.

It'll be grand.

It'll be grand.

It can cause a huge amount of anxiety for german people for instance they're like what the do you mean it'll be grand like it'll be grand is the reason our buses don't arrive on time like in ireland buses don't arrive on time that's just how it is there's nothing wrong nothing's broken buses don't arrive on time why don't buses arrive on time because it'll be grand the bus is going to be here it's it's probably going to be here but it's not going to be on time because it'll be grand like i i was once on a bus to the airport

and the fucking bus driver stopped the bus so that he could get off and go into a bookies and place a bed on a horse and then came back out and drove the bus.

Chaos, but it's also one of those things I do like about Ireland.

But my theory is that it'll be grand tends to be fine on an individual basis.

But when a group of Irish people collectively together say it'll be grand, then you end up with fucking chaos then you have an environment where nobody's taking accountability and

it's how you end up with with giant furniture or or a gigantic a gigantic painting of a starling on a street where they're trying to downplay the starling shit problem

nobody's being clever there I promise you I promise you, nobody's being clever.

Nobody's trying to ironically subvert the starling shit problem there.

They just didn't think about it.

So for this week's podcast,

I want to follow a thread on some of the themes I'm speaking about.

Kinda like a part two, almost like a part two, to that podcast I made three years ago called an in-depth thesis about bird shit.

I want to use the bird shit on this street as a starting point.

On the other podcast from a few years back, I basically basically told the story of fertilizer, bird shit as a source of nitrogen.

For this podcast,

I've got a theory

that a volcanic eruption that happened in the 1800s

led to people training falcons to have sex with their heads.

And it all ties back to the bird shit district.

Hear me out.

So why are there so many starlings in Limerick City?

Why is this one street

inundated with starlings every summer?

Starlings, they're migratory birds.

They're native birds, but they, I think our starlings, they fly off to Eastern Europe, then they come back.

Starlings are fascinating.

So this is what

you might have starlings in your city.

Starlings are the ones.

who go up into this into the sky and they fly as one and they dance in a pattern in the sky in the evenings, right?

Those are starlings.

So what happens in Limerick City with the starlings is

you'd be down by the river.

Like I said, at twilight, having your pint or having your coffee, looking down on the river.

And without fail, every night at about twilight, when the sun's gone down, and it's slanty and peachy, you look out above the Shannon River.

and there's your starlings and they're flying in the air together as one unified shape, right?

That's known as a marmoration.

Why do starlings do this?

They're trying to frighten off predators,

specifically birds of prey.

If you look at those starlings moving together like a shoal of fish in the sky, sometimes they even look like a giant bird.

It's phenomenal, but they are literally doing that to freak out any falcons or hawks or buzzards that are thinking of eating them.

They're freaking them out.

Then once the starlings do that evening dance in the sky when the sun goes down and the starlings are comfortable that they've frightened off any hawks or any falcons.

Then the starlings come down and they rest in the trees.

And in Limerick they do this on this Bedford Row street, the Birdship district

and thousands of them go into the leaves of the trees and they talk and talk and shit and talk and shit scientists reckon they're literally communicating about where to get the best food that day but they're not just talking about food in their droppings are seeds from plants that they've eaten that day So like a starling murmuration going into trees and shitting on the ground.

That's essential for the health of meadows and forests.

But here in Limerick City, it's just paving.

There's nothing there.

But the starlings don't know.

They think that they're in a concrete forest.

Now there's a possibility that these starlings, because there's loads of them, there's a possibility that there's too many starlings because they don't have natural predators anymore.

Even though they go up into the sky to do their marmoration, their dance, to frighten off their predators, the falcons and the hawks, even though they do that, the falcons and hawks, they're not in sufficient numbers to eat the starlings.

And that's important.

This is an ecosystem.

Starlings are indigenous birds and there's birds of prey that are indigenous birds and nature is cruel sometimes.

But predators prey on flocks of animals and it benefits the entire ecosystem.

But the starlings don't have predators anymore.

So maybe there's too many starlings or maybe they're a little bit too relaxed.

Maybe what's needed in Limerick City is a few fucking falcons, a few falcons and a few hawks, that can prey upon the starlings and restore a sense of balance.

And when I was thinking about that this week and researching it, I went down a fucking mad rabbit hole.

So I started to ask myself the question of

you know, where the fuck are the hawks?

Where are the hawks and the falcons and the buzzards?

Why did these animals almost go fucking extinct?

Why did they almost go extinct?

Why do we have to put such great effort into reintroducing birds of prey specifically?

Well, I want to begin by talking about a volcanic eruption in 1816.

Actually, before I do that, because I don't want to interrupt myself, let's have a little ocarina pause.

Don't have an ocarina.

What have I got here?

A scissors?

I'm going to clip this scissors here, and you're going to hear an advert for something, okay?

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A dog's love letter to his squeaky avocado.

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It's Stock Up September at Whole Foods Market.

Find sales on supplements to power up for busy weeks.

Plus, pack your pantry with pasta, sauce, and more everyday essentials.

Enjoy quick breakfast for less with 365 by Whole Foods Market seasonal coffee and oatmeal.

Grab ready-to-heat meals that are perfect for the office and save on versatile no antibiotics ever chicken breasts.

Stock up now at Whole Foods Market, in-store and online.

Jesus Christ,

this is a very strange podcast this week.

God help anyone who's a new listener.

I'm not even going to explain why I'm doing this.

Okay, you'd have heard an advert there for some bullshit.

This podcast is supported by you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast if you enjoy this podcast if it brings you mirth merriment distraction whatever the fuck has you listening to this podcast please consider paying me for the work that I put into this podcast because it's my full-time job it's how I rent out my office it's how I buy all my equipment this is how I earn a living it's how I pay my bills I deliver this podcast every week I write it, I research it, I do it all myself, and that's only possible because it's my full-time job.

So if you want to support this podcast directly, please do on the Patreon page.

All I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month, that's it.

If you met me in real life, would you buy me a pint?

Well, you can.

But

if you can't afford that, if you don't have any money right now, if you don't have a job, whatever the fuck, if you can't afford that, then you listen for free because the person who is paying is paying for you to listen for free.

So everybody gets the exact same podcast and I get to earn a living.

Most importantly keeping this podcast fully independent means I'm not beholden to advertisers.

I'm not worried about how many listens I get, how popular the podcast is.

I just want to make sure I show up each week, show up each week and that every week that I make a podcast that I'm genuinely passionate about and where I'm genuinely exploring my curiosity.

Patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast.

And please don't sign up using the Patreon app on an iPhone because Apple will take 30% of your money.

Fuck that.

Do it on a browser or on a browser on your phone.

Upcoming gigs.

My tour of England and Scotland there in June.

That's only a month away now.

I can't wait to do that.

Bristol, Cornwall, Sheffield, Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow, York, London, East Sussex, and Norwich.

I'm coming doing some wonderful live podcasts with cracking guests.

They're going to be magnificent gigs.

Come out ye cracking tens

and come to my live podcasts in June.

And then after that, what the fuck have we got?

Derry there in September on the 19th.

Derry's going to be good fun.

And then

there is a Vicar Street, I believe, also in Dublin in September.

So, come along to that too.

I hope I'm able to record my fucking podcast now when I'm on the road in England and Scotland.

It's an intense tour, a very intense tour, and it's like three weeks.

So, hopefully, I'll be able to get my shit out.

So, I want to talk about the disappearance of birds of prey, specifically falcons, because all around the world

their numbers diminished.

So, insects and parasites, fleas, ticks.

These used to be a huge problem in human society.

Even a hundred years ago, less, up until the 1940s.

Human beings would have knits in their hair, fleas would be biting them, parasites.

A lot of us really take for granted today that

we don't really have to think about fleas and nits and ticks as part of our daily life.

We don't have to think about these things, they're not around anymore.

Like disease, too.

The fucking plague, the plague that killed millions

in the medieval period was spread by fleas.

So, in 1816,

there was this volcano in Indonesia called Mount Tambora, and it erupted, and it was a fucking huge eruption, massive, and it spread an ash cloud into the air that was so high

that 1816 was known as the year without a summer.

Europe did not have a summer in 1816.

The sun was blocked out from this fucking volcano that erupted.

The River Thames froze over.

And in Ireland,

if you think of first off, there was famines all over fucking Europe because people weren't able to grow crops that year because it was winter all year because of this volcano.

But also what it did was

it forced people indoors.

So people stayed indoors all year.

They stayed in cramped spaces.

It was damp and wet because it was winter all year.

In Ireland you had extreme poverty.

So you had these really poor people with no means

cramped.

in small spaces all year staying indoors trying to stay warm wearing the exact same clothes every single day because it's freezing all year round, there's no fucking summer.

And this led to an outbreak of fleas.

So fleas had the perfect conditions that year to explode in population.

And it led to an epidemic in Ireland of a disease called typhus.

Typhus, again, it's one of these diseases.

you tend not to hear of typhus in the global north anymore.

It's

an extreme fever and sickness that you can get from flea bites, from infected flea bites and it kills people and in

18 between 1816 and 1817 in Ireland 65,000 people died from typhus and I think close to a million were infected because of this explosion in the flea population.

because there was no summer and it wasn't just Ireland, all over Europe.

Flea populations exploded unnaturally because the year without a summer, it created perfect conditions for these fleas to breed.

Now we don't really worry about fleas today or parasites of any description because

we've got access to hot water, we can bathe ourselves frequently,

we've got access to cheap clothing, we can change our clothes frequently, we have access to we can wash our clothes with hot water and detergent.

We've got plumbing.

General improvements in sanitation means that us in the global north, we're not really thinking about fleas.

We're not thinking, and because we're not thinking about fleas, we're not worrying about bubonic plague.

Bubonic plague, like the plague that killed millions of people throughout Europe.

We're not worrying about plague.

We're not worrying about typhus.

These diseases don't exist for us in the global north because of sanitation, but typhus, it became a huge problem.

It was exacerbated by that volcano, but throughout the 1800s and into the early 20th century, especially anytime you had a war, if you had a war and you had a lot of soldiers

And we're talking hundreds of thousands of soldiers in battle and they can't they're huddled together They can't wash their clothes They're not bathing.

Those soldiers had to worry about not just getting killed, but an outbreak of typhus, this fever caused by fleas that could knock an entire fucking army.

So armies used to, they used to spray their soldiers and where soldiers were with insecticide.

But in the 1800s,

insecticide didn't really exist, not as we know it today.

There was a natural insecticide called perethrum.

It came from

it came from flowers that were very similar to daisies, but it was a limited resource and controlled by the colonial powers.

This parithrum, the daisy that this natural insecticide came from, it was grown by the British in Kenya and I think parts of India and also Japan.

So

killing parasites and insects that can cause these huge plagues

and pandemics, this was really fucking difficult and it was a there was limited resources.

So even while World War I is happening and World War II the world doesn't really have a reliable insecticide until 1939.

So in 1874 this Austrian chemist

he found a substance called DDT and in 1939 another scientist figured holy fuck

this is an insecticide.

Not only is this an insecticide but this is highly effective and it's pretty much unlimited.

So now the world goes from having a limited amount of insecticide to unlimited insecticide.

So during World War II, the Allied forces,

they start spraying this chemical DDT fucking everywhere.

And it kills insects.

It's very, very effective at killing fleas, mites, ticks, all of these

really dangerous human parasites that can cause mass illness now all of a sudden we're able to control this.

Like you've got huge refugee populations during World War II and the likes of Italy.

Incredibly poor, starving, huddled masses full of people living in an environment that historically there'd be an outbreak of typhus and they'd all die.

Now they're not dying.

because this DDT insecticide chemical is being spread everywhere and

people's lives are not only being changed, humanity is changing for the first time ever.

Soldiers and humans aren't worried about insect-borne plagues.

The black plague, bubonic plague, and fucking typhus.

Because this insecticide is just incredible and they can spread everywhere.

So World War II is ravishing the entire fucking world.

Everywhere is affected by World War II.

Everywhere you've got people displaced poverty poor sanitation but this DDT shit that's being spread

it's killing all the disease carrying insects

diseases like yellow fever malaria these things now aren't a problem tropical regions fucking millions of people's lives are saved during World War II but mostly the displaced civilians a lot more people should have a lot of people died during World War II.

A lot more people should have died if it wasn't for DDT killing all the harmful insects and the human parasites.

But the problem is, this is the world's first ever insecticide.

We didn't understand insecticides.

It starts to kill all the fucking insects.

The DDT being spread around the world after World War II

causes

the biodiversity collapse that you and I live in today.

like it's

it's unfathomable to imagine what the world must have been like 150 years ago when it comes to animals and insects.

It's unfathomable.

I've told you myself, like I read a short story writer called Leomoff Laherty,

who

he was from the Aron Islands in about 1910, and he used to write stories where he'd describe a lot of nature.

And when I read his stories, it feels like he's lying.

When he talks about how many fish and insects he would see I literally go this man is lying and it's like no there was a massive massive abundance of living things

about 150 years ago.

Well DDT this fucking insecticide after after World War II that really started to cause the biodiversity collapse that you and I now just experience as normal because it started to kill all the insects and then it started to go into the soil and leach into the groundwater then it started to kill fish.

DDT was really really fucking bad but people didn't spot this

and after World War II

America having seen how effective DDT was in preventing the spread of typhus and malaria in a war zone They now start to use this wide scale

and civilian populations and the rest of the world followed and just a mad example of how

of how political ideology can end up in policy decisions in a way you wouldn't imagine so one of the most destructive campaigns of spraying DDT

everywhere was in the 1950s in America

And this is so there was this new

there was an invasive insect in America.

It was an ant called the red imported fire ant.

That was the name of the insect, the red imported fire ant.

It came from South America and by the 1950s, it had reached the United States.

And it's a harmful enough invasive species.

It is harmful.

It eats crops.

It's not indigenous and it definitely needs to be controlled and the red imported fire ant is a threat to biodiversity and food systems without a doubt.

But the thing is,

in America in the 1950s, that was the height of the fucking Cold War.

And America in the 1950s was terrified of Russia and paranoid about Russia and terrified and paranoid about communism.

This period was known as the Reds Under the Bed period.

where America had gotten itself into

a moral panic where they believed that everybody was a communist.

People were accusing their colleagues of being fucking communists.

I mean you look back at it and think, Jesus, that was mad.

It's not too different now to how right now under Trump in America, the way that people are being treated on college campuses, if they're opposing the genocide in Gaza, We're seeing people who are engaging in protest and activism.

And if they're if they're from a Middle Eastern country and they're they're engaging in protest and activism on American college campuses,

secret fucking American police are taking them away and deporting them.

But in the 1950s, the Marlow Panic was called Reds Under the Bed.

And

the people of America were terrified of communists, Reds, Soviets,

and the government policy was terrified of Reds.

And this ant,

the Red Imported Fire Ant, because of its fucking name,

because it just happened to be called the red imported fire ant,

it meant that the US Department of Agriculture completely overestimated the threat of this ant because its name, because of the red imported fire ant, it sounded like a communist Soviet fucking spy.

So because it'd be like during 9-11

if there was a spider called the bin Laden spider or the jihadi spider

so the US embarked on this this massive campaign of spraying DDT fucking everywhere over cities they covered the entire country in this incredibly harsh dangerous insecticide so that they could kill the red imported fire ant which itself was driven by ideological anti-communism which has fuck all to do with ants.

America did massive damage Massive, massive damage to its ecosystem by spraying this DDT everywhere and then the rest of the world followed.

Now the positive side of this thing is

this is one of the reasons why you or I don't have to worry about typhus anymore.

This is why you probably have never had fleas or nits in your lifetime.

But it's also the reason the climate is collapsing.

What the fuck does this have to do with Limerick City?

Well those starlings, like I said this flock of starlings, they're possibly

There's probably too many starlings in Limerick City because they don't have natural predators anymore.

Apex predators are keystone species, and when you take them out, you end up with some degree of collapse.

But what happened?

What happened to the eagles, to the hawks, to the falcons?

What happened to the birds of prey?

Did people kill them because they were killing sheep?

DDT.

DDT is what happened to birds of prey.

But it happened, it's a strange one.

It happened through a process called biomagnification, right?

So

the insects were the ones being killed by DDT.

Okay, so insects are getting killed by DDT.

But then there's birds that eat the insects.

So DDT doesn't break down in the environment.

It tends to stick around, right?

So

the insects are getting sprayed with the DDT.

Then birds like starlings, starlings are eating the insects.

But then the falcons and the hawks, they are eating the starlings.

The DDT isn't breaking down.

So it means that the animals that are at the top of the food chain end up accumulating more and more DDT in their systems.

Like this is the same reason that tuna has a lot of mercury in it.

Like they say you shouldn't eat tuna more than three times a week.

That the healthiest fish to eat are small fish like herring or mackerel.

But fucking tuna, because tuna is gigantic, tuna is about the same size as a car.

There's naturally occurring mercury in the oceans.

It's not just because of pollution.

So plankton, they absorb mercury from the oceans, then small fish eat the plankton, and then the tuna eat the small fish, and they're apex predators and they're large.

So tuna actually has quite a lot of mercury in it.

And then we eat the tuna, because we're the fucking top apex predator, and you have to be careful about eating tuna and mercury.

But this biomagnification,

this is we ended up by the 1960s

all around the world, all our birds of prey had massive amounts of DDT accumulated in their bodies.

And the strange thing is, so the DDT

It didn't kill the birds of prey.

So, I'm talking falcons and hawks and eagles and buzzards.

It didn't kill them.

What it did is it fucked with their capacity to metabolize calcium.

And calcium is what eggs are made out of.

So it led to a generation of birds of prey who were laying soft eggs

and then nothing was getting hatched.

So by the 1970s,

birds of prey were almost fucking extinct.

Their numbers had gone very, very small all around the world because of this DDT business.

This is where it starts to get fucking mad.

So people who worked with birds of prey started to notice this collapse, this complete collapse of the bird of prey population.

And they started to figure out, these eggs aren't right.

There's something going on here with these eggs.

So even though the birds of prey are having sex with each other and laying eggs, something's not right here.

So it was really bad.

So by the 1960s,

there was nothing, let's just take America, there was no wild falcons east of the Rocky Mountains, only a handful.

So you're talking birds of prey were almost gone.

By the 1960s, they were almost gone and memory, like the fucking dinosaurs.

And then a professor of ornithology called Tom Cade, he was the first one to go, yeah, I think I know what's happening.

I think this is DDT and I think it's getting to the eggs.

So a small group of humans stepped up.

They formed a thing called the Peregrine Fund.

And they stepped up and they said, Right, well, we're gonna have to

have to get involved here and we're gonna have to save birds of prey, specifically the peregrine falcon.

We're gonna have to fucking save them.

There were so few peregrine falcons left that they could not rely upon them to have sex with each other in the wild and to procreate.

So, this group are like,

okay, we're gonna have to capture sperm from falcons

and artificially inseminate eggs.

We're gonna have to figure out how to wank a falcon.

Literally, how do we wank a falcon?

And it was really difficult.

First off, they've got really weird tiny cocks,

and then they figured out

it took

three adult humans to wank off a falcon and to get the falcon horny.

This was not working.

They were really worried that we think this bird is going to go extinct because it takes three of us to wank them off.

And this is impossible.

And then this lunatic comes along called Lester Boyd.

And Lester By

Lester Byde is like, okay,

this isn't working.

We have to, the falcons are dying.

We got it.

It takes three of us to wank off a falcon.

We can't do it.

There needs to be a solution here.

So Lester Byde

basically raises baby falcons, male falcons from an egg,

and he grooms

baby falcons to be sexually attracted to his head.

I'm 100% serious.

He's raising, hatching male falcons

and keeping them in isolation and training the falcons to identify his head as a sexual object.

And then he invents a hat.

Call a falcon sex hat.

It's a strange

rubber hat.

I reckon he designed it after a condom.

It's

like a little hipster beanie on your head, right?

But the hat is made out of rubber and it has tiny holes all over it like a honeycomb.

And literally,

he would stand there with his rubber falcon hat on and the falcon would get horny and fuck his head.

I'm dead serious.

And then the falcon is having sex with his head and then ejaculating all over the hat.

But the hat has these tiny little holes in it, all over it, like these honeycomb holes.

And now the falcon cum

is being held in these little concaves in the hat.

Now he's got a hat full of falcon cum

and he's injecting it into eggs.

And they're artificially inseminating falcon eggs.

And it worked.

It worked.

The wild population of falcons that had been decimated by DDT, it started to be rebuilt

by these lads wearing hats and letting falcons fuck their heads.

I'm dead serious.

And there's entire falcon grooming manuals available about what you need to do to raise a fucking peregrine falcon from a hatchling and how to make it sexually attracted to your head.

And for it to have sex with this rubber hat on your head, it's still being done.

I can go online and I can buy one.

You can go onto Google and you can buy a falcon sex hat for 200 quid.

I'm dead serious.

Most importantly, this worked.

By the 1990s, so that's 30 years later, by the 1990s,

wild falcon populations in America had stabilized and people stopped using DDT, obviously.

By the 1960s, people figured out that this DDT was bad shit.

Wasn't the first

insecticide to destroy insect populations and destroy the environment.

I mean, they replaced DDT with

insecticides that were made from nicotine.

Like nicotine that's in cigarettes.

They replaced them with

neonicotinides.

And these were spread throughout the 1990s thinking that these were safe.

These neonicotinoids...

This is what caused...

This is why there's no more fucking bees.

They killed all the bees.

They caused colony collapse disorder.

Someone needs to figure out how to train bees to have sex with their head now.

But as bizarre as it is, the person who invented the falcon sex hat, they changed our world.

We could be talking about the falcon as if it is the dodo now, a wonderful bird of prey that no longer exists.

It was on the brink and it was saved by a...

a mad sex hat.

So here's my proposal.

And this is...

I got this hot take this week when I was just thinking about the Bardshit district.

Thinking about all the starlings.

Thinking about all the shits that they do, how they're an uncontrolled population.

There's no one culling them.

No natural culling.

And I was thinking about this.

And I went, yeah,

a volcanic eruption in 1818.

You can trace that.

directly to people training falcons to have sex with their heads.

But I propose this as a solution for Limerick and I'd like Limerick City Council to listen.

These falcon sex hats are only two hundred quid online.

I propose that we put a falcon sex hat

on the Terry Wogan statue that's at the very, very bottom of Bedford Row, the bottom of the Birdshit District.

We put a rubber falcon sex hat on the Terry Wogan statue.

We hatch some falcons and train them to have sex with his head.

and then we artificially inseminate some local limerick falcons.

And then, eventually, in about 10 years' time, they're gonna cull the starling population.

And that's the solution that I propose.

And it might work.

Fucking hell.

Okay,

that's all I've got time for this week.

In the Irish Examiner this week, my podcast was recommended as a cure for toxic masculinity in

Centrist Dads.

Someone wrote an article and they recommended my podcast as a cure for toxic masculinity.

And

there's a part of me that wanted to do the episode on this topic because I just know

there's going to be some man called Donald in his 50s who's going to read that article and go, do you know what?

I'm going to give the Blind Boy podcast.

I'm going to give that a chance.

I've heard that this, you know, this podcast is really on point when it comes to issues of toxic masculinity.

And I want them to listen to this episode.

I want this to be the first one that they hear.

I hope you enjoyed that, Donald.

Okay, that's all I have time for this week.

I'll be back next week with another hot take.

I don't know.

In the meantime,

rub a dog, wink at a swan, let a falcon have sex with your head.

You know, it's a strange one that I don't think the sex hat works with other

it only works with the falcon family because they're very highly trainable birds.

I don't think it works with ospreys or buzzards or hawks.

It's just the falcon family.

But anyway, look, I'll catch you next week.

God bless.

bless.

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