Terrestrials: Stumpisode
32:37 Share

Radio Lab is supported by Progressive Insurance. Whether you love true crime or comedy, celebrity interviews or news, you call the shots on what's in your podcast queue. And guess what? Now you can call the shots on your auto insurance too with the Name Your Price tool from Progressive. It works just the way it sounds. You tell Progressive how much you want to pay for car insurance and they'll show you coverage options that fit your budget.

Get your quote today at Progressive.com to join the over 28 million drivers who trust Progressive. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law.

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 it's good. Okay, okay, okay. Okay, so. Okay. Yeah, okay. Oh, well, we should say this is Radiolab. I'm Latif Nasser. And I'm Lily Miller. And you have been on maternity leave, and you still are on maternity leave, but for some reason you have come back for a minute. I'm emerging from the pajama land of maternity leave. Okay.

Because I have some news. I have some exciting news, which is that Terrestrials is back. Bum-ba-dum-bum.

Yeah, we've got a whole new season of our family-friendly nature show. Just dropped. It is just out. Seven new episodes. Seven new romps through nature. Seven new wild stories. Yeah, but like with animal and historical and scientific detours that are... And musical detours. And musical detours, most of all. Through all kinds of... You know, we've got an episode about squirrels coming up. We've got an episode about...

deep dwelling sharks we got an episode about lichen i'm liking it so yeah that's what i'm here to tell you if you like nature and how often and where what's the where do they find it and how often yes okay you head on over to the radio lab for kids feed where there is stuff coming out all the time basically every other week right now we've we've got uh that's ramped up a little we got stuff coming out every week and you just look for the terrestrials episodes and

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. That's so great. I'm so excited. Congratulations. But also you have something you are presenting to us right now. Yeah, no, right. I guess to celebrate, we are going to give you a taste of the first one.

which just came out. It's so fun. It's such a fun episode. I mean, it's like you've made something dead alive, which I think is so fun to listen to. It's a thing that seems dead, but maybe is less dead than we think. Yeah, so take a listen. Wait, you're listening? Okay. All right, all right. You're listening to Radiolab.

Radio from WNYC. Three, two, one. Imagine you standing in the middle of a forest. Your arms break off and your insides hollow out. Your skin turns hard and rough. Humans think of you as being dead.

Like a ghost. But the birds and insects and rodents know the truth about you. Inside, you're brimming with life. You birth babies. You fight fire. You can even catch time. You have become... A stump. Now is the part where I make you sing the theme song with me. Oh, God. Okay. Terrestrials, terrestrials. We are not the worst, we are the...

Best? Terrestrials. Hey, you got it! 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 song bud, Talon. It's the Stumpisode! And this season, we are looking at things that are usually...

And today's guide through the wild world of tree stumps is Scottish artist, writer and tree expert, Amanda Thompson. I don't see myself as being an expert in trees, maybe more a lover of trees. Now, Amanda grew up like most of us, not really noticing stumps. Or if she did, noticing what they weren't. Trees are for climbing, aren't they? Can't build a tree house in a stump, can't get shade from a stump. No. So stumps seem 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. They don't look like they're doing anything, but they're doing so much. 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. It was very pale. A lot of the bark had fallen off of it, so it was almost silver.

It was a kind of stump called a snag, where part of the tree still stands, but it's hollow inside. All of the upper branches had snapped. And as she studied its kind of spooky form, the giant stump began casting its spell. I just started to notice all these dead trees in the middle of all the life that was going on. And without really knowing why, she got out her camera and began...

taking pictures. They're almost like skeletons.

Can you say any more about what drew you to them at the beginning? I was just drawn to their difference. She related to that feeling. 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.

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

She kept spending time with these dead trees, trying to get to know them by taking pictures of them. They're beautiful shapes. And drawing them. Made some films. Of dead trees. Etchings of dead trees. Sound recordings of, you guessed it, dead trees.

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 different beasties that are there. Beasties like beetles and wasps and mushrooms and flies. They hold so much life within them. The scientists taught her there's a whole class of creatures that need stumps to live. They're what's called stumps.

Saproxilic. Saproxilic? Uh-huh.

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 that lay their babies inside. Or wasps that chew stumps to create nests. And sometimes stumps break apart to create whole new worlds. Sometimes in the holes, like, you can get water as well, so that creates another microhabitat. Like,

Like a little pool, a little pond in the dead tree? Yeah. And while wasps and 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.

Studies reckon that a healthy forest needs 30% deadwood in order to be a healthy forest. Oh, that is so much of the forest. Absolutely. But Amanda was just getting started.

She would go on to spend the next 20 years studying stumps. Yeah. And is now going to 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. That's brilliant, isn't it? The tour departs the station right after this short break. ♪

Radio Lab is supported by Betterment. Do you wish your money could be motivated? That it could get up to rise and grind and work hard for you? Don't worry. Betterment is here to help. Betterment is the automated investing and savings app that makes your money hustle. Their automated technology is built to help better your money.

maximize returns meaning when you invest with betterment your money can auto adjust as you get closer to your goal rebalance if your portfolio gets too far out of line and your dividends are automatically reinvested that can increase the potential for compound returns in other words your money is working like a dog while you can be sleeping like one you'll never picture your money the same way again betterment the automated investing and savings app that makes your money hustle visit betterment.com to get started investing involves risk performance is not guaranteed

Radiolab is supported by IXL. IXL is an online learning program that helps to enrich homeschool curriculums, offering practice in math, science, social studies, and more. Their programs are designed to meet kids where they're at, helping them develop curiosity and determination all the way through 12th grade, no matter your child's learning style or knowledge level.

Ixl has built-in tools like video tutorials, detailed explanations, and learning games to guide your child in the way they learn best while meeting them at their level. Make an impact on your child's learning. Get Ixl now. Listeners can get an exclusive 20% off Ixl membership when they sign up today at Ixl.com slash Radiolab. Visit Ixl.com slash Radiolab to get the most effective learning program out there at the best price.

On this week's On the Media, we go back in time to the infamous election call that put Fox News on the map. Fox News now projects George W. Bush the winner in Florida, and thus it appears the winner of the presidency of the United States. Fox News, the origin story on this week's On the Media from WNYC. Find On the Media wherever you get your podcasts. ♪

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. That's our stump lover, Amanda Thompson. Okay, Amanda, where are you taking us for stump one? We're going to Illinois. Rural Illinois to meet a stump that changed the sky. I am somewhere in southern Illinois. I'm looking out at a bunch of windmills. Just do-do-do.

Once Amanda revealed the location, I hopped in my car and drove for hours. A lot of fields, through flat, kind of dry-looking industrial bean farms and corn farms, until, oh, I turned off onto a little dirt road to meet with a firefighter. Hey! It's great to meet you! Named Tyler Funk, who, well, discovered this stump. So we are approaching stump. We're close.

We walk for a while on the mud and sprouts of a bean farm until... Yeah, it's kind of gnarled and almost black. Really dark brown. We reach a huge stump up to my shoulders. Very typical, like, pretty flat top. Little bit of bird poop on it. Now, Tyler, like Amanda, didn't think he cared about stumps. He was way more into... It's a lot of birding gear. Yeah. Do you have binocs? Birding. They're in here. Oh, yeah, big ones.

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 the little birds that came out of the brush. Sparrows. And sweet little warblers and finches flitting about in their natural habitat. 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? It's going so fast and it punches something with his fist and it can just, I don't want to be morbid, but it can just basically disintegrate, you know, what it hits. Oh, so it doesn't grab, it just punches? Yes, it's just like hitting it with a hammer. Whoa! Gnarly!

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 ever 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...

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. You could just watch him just stretching his wings, you know, yawning. And hunting. The stump made the perfect perch for the falcon to scan for prey. Oh yeah. 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. I have footage of a snowy owl sitting on the stump. Raptors, kestrels, hooper's hawk, red-tailed hawk, rough-legged hawk. Whoa.

Whoa. And it didn't stop there. Coyotes have been up there, so they've had a pretty good jump to get up there. I think I've had skunk up there, a weasel, a mink, rats, possums, and there's mice that come out and crawl around on that stump. It was almost like a fairy tale, where the stump was a kind of magnet that pulled rare beasts from the sky and below. Actually, this winter, I had a bobcat on top.

What? Yeah, I really didn't expect to see that. 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. We're looking at basically scarred earth that all you can see is dirt. There's really no...

biodiversity out here. Oh, this is kind of like a desert out here. I think actually a desert probably has better biodiversity than this does, to be honest. It's worse than a desert. It's worse than a desert, yeah. 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... The Magic Stump. The Magic Stump.

Okay, so that was stump number one. Amanda, where is the next stump on our tour? We are going to Buckhannon, West Virginia. West Virginia! And now, apparently, we are going to up the ante. We're going to meet a stump that is not just a hotel for rodents and birds and coyotes, but... Humans. Humans? Yeah. We're walking across a field, kind of like a soccer field.

There's a little river to our right. We sent the songbud Alan and producer Anna to go check it out. There it is. Straight ahead is this large... Big, wiry... Wiry white...

I love how this tree looks. Like, it looks old. All right, so we are going to roll back to the 1700s. The forest was dense with ancient oaks and spruces and maples. It was the absolute wilderness. Huge trees. This is Gene Thorne, a wildlife biologist who is probably the world expert on this one particular stump. Yeah. And the story goes that running through that forest were two brothers who were trying to escape.

Now, 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... Copperheads, rattlesnakes, mountain lions. And of course, the British Army, they would be in huge trouble, like executed trouble, if they were caught.

And one day, these brothers, Sam and John Pringle, they came to the banks of a river and they saw... Well, that's where they found the hollow sycamore tree. A massive hollow stump with bright white bark. It was over 11 foot high, 11 foot wide. It's the size of a bedroom in an apartment. Wow! Wow!

So tentatively, they climbed inside. I can't believe how deep that goes. I can't believe you're standing up right now. Oh, easy too. Like, I can put my arms straight up in the air and I am not touching the top. And they liked it. It was warm, cozy. It smells like a fresh forest floor. Yeah, it is. So they decided to move in and almost immediately began tricking out their stump. ♪

Welcome to MTV Cribs Stumps Edition. Today we got the Pringle Brothers. Let's check out this stump. First we got the bed. Mattress made of leaves. Layers of fur hides. Fuzzy. They use their hides for blankets. Mad cozy. And check out this door. Made out of bark. Custom made. Tan skin to keep the winter weather out. Yo, and no stump is complete without a lit fireplace for cooking up gamey stew. Ooh. Ahem.

Where's all that smoke going to go? A little opening at the top where the smoke went up and out. It's just like a chimney. See you next time. Wait, but so if you were to like walk through the forest and you come across this kind of giant 11-foot-tall stump.

And there'd be like a little trail of smoke coming out the top. Yeah. So you'd have a smoky smell. Okay. I mean, 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? Now that's a really interesting question.

Because apparently one day a bear did attack. Well, after Sam had tried to shoot it. He had big red eyes and there was these snarls of saliva coming out of his mouth. 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. 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. And I...

Sunk that knife behind his shoulder and I blacked out right then. A few hours later. John, he found me 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. Good brother, John. Great brother. Sam's little brother knew he was going to 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... I was running out of food. It was getting critical. But then one glorious day... 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. 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. Pioneers came over the mountain with him, and they all lived in that tree until they got their cabins built. Wow.

Wow. So there were several families, actually, that lived in there for a time period. Oh, so like how many people do you think in that one stump? About 10 to 12 people that would have been inside there. Yeah. That's a tight pack.

The stump sheltered them as Sam Pringle and his friends built cabin after cabin, which would eventually turn into the city of Buck Cannon, 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. Pass me a Pringle, Pringle. All right.

We are in the Pringle tree and we are eating Pringles. Pringles. Cheers. Cheers. They taste better in the tree. They taste better in the tree. They sound better in the tree. Mm-hmm.

All right, we have visited the magic stump that changed the sky, the Pringle stump that birthed the city. Amanda, where are we going for our final stump stop? We're going to Wales. 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. Very choppy. But when the storm finally passed...

There arose from the water all these mysterious structures. Dozens of black pointy... Protrusions that looked like shark's fins. But upon closer inspection... It turned out they were stumps. Petrified snags and stumps. Petrified meaning hardened. Fossilized. 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 human footprints of children and adults from more than 5,000 years ago. Scientists analyzed the footprints and learned that this area, which was deep underwater, used to be a human civilization.

And the wild part is this scientific data held in the stumps echoed an ancient legend from Wales, a sort of local fairy tale 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. 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. Hmm. True!

Well, that concludes Amanda's tour to stumps. Just been so lovely to spend time talking about stumps with you, Lulu. Oh, it's been the best. And that was only three stumps out of all the stumps we've written about, out of all the stumps on the planet. Yeah. 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. Yeah.

Yeah. And there are probably so many more secrets and powers waiting in the dead looking parts of the forest. Absolutely. I'm still learning. I haven't finished yet, but I don't know where I'm going to go next.

If you're a stump or a snag, you're fabulous, Deadwood. 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. I try to get to the root of it all. I'm out of limb, I can't leave it alone. Hot shot, I wanna know what you got. Deadwood, aha, I wanna watch you rot. D-U-D-U-D.

One, two, tree, four. Hardcore Arbor. A tree corpse on the forest floor. Check out the stump. Thump, thump. Yeah, that's what I'm looking for. They say you're dead wood, but I think you're kind of not. Because you're full of life. Yeah, you're so alive. What more could anybody want from thee? One and only S-T-U-M-P. S-T-U-M-P. S-T-U-M-P. S-T-U-M-P. S-T-U-M-P.

L-A-N-G-O-F-I-N-S-K-E

Ali Kapinski, everyone. Breaking 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 is nothing else cool about to happen. What's that? Excuse me. I have a question. Me too. Me three. Me four. The Badgers. Listeners, with badgering questions for the experts. Are you ready? Yeah. 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? That's quite sad and quite existential. Maybe it's just living its own moment. My name is Elise. I'm six years old. Can trees get band-aids for snags?

You're going to have to ask a scientist about that question. Okay. Gene? Yeah, they can. There's people that make a living. They call themselves tree surgeons. And if you get a broken branch off, you can actually go and wrap it up with a Band-Aid. Wow. Kind of a tar-y like substance goes underneath to keep the moisture from getting inside and causing rot. Wow, I wonder if those tree surgeons had to take a Hippocratic Oat

Hi, my name is Sia. I'm 12 years old. My question is, do bears scratch themselves on deadwood or only on trees that are alive? For the most part, they choose live trees. 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, they're trying to rub and get ticks dislodged and off of themselves. And there's been some research that the oils off of birch trees and pine resin are actually a tick repellent. Smart!

Hmm. Is it because of the shape of the stump? You can't see a way to branch off into your thinking? I have been stumped.

Well, that is the most perfect place to leave it. Biggest thanks again to Amanda Thompson. 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 Thompson.

Terrestrials was created by me, Lulu Miller with WNYC Studios. This episode was produced by Ana Gonzalez, Mira Birtwintonic, Alan Gafinski, Joe Plord, and me with help from Tanya Chawla, Sarah Sandbach, and Valentina Powers. Fact-checking by Natalie Middleton. Support for Terrestrials is provided by the Simons Foundation, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, the Calliopeia Foundation, and the John Templeton Foundation. Thank you.

And also wanted to give a big shout out to the documentary, The Magic Stump. That is how I learned about Tyler Funk's stump. Tyler Funk's stump 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.

Finally, teachers, we have free, free, free, free teaching materials on our websites 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 Radiolab4Kids.org.

If you are liking what you're 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 with this dirty old planet of ours.

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. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.

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 going to be G-rated and you're going to get a story that...

We'll take you into the natural world and kind of hopefully make you see it really anew and where you might have some fun. And where you might get a song stuck in your head that you can't get out. In a deep cold ocean we swim alone. A little misunderstood, but we're at home. Yeah, we may seem gross.

Yeah, and what's really fun this season, I actually don't know if you know this, Lacha, if you might, but Alan, the song bud, Alan Gofinski, who writes all the songs, he got really into collaboration, and there are all these rock stars on the songs this season. There's different episodes that have different people. Like who? 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. Illinois is 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. So yeah, there's good, there's great music, there's wild stories, and we are very excited to share them with everybody. And you are after this

studio session. You are going back to the pajamas. Running back to my baby. Right? The baby, yes. The baby. Yeah, I'm going back. I'm maternity leave. And when do you come back? And I come back in January. Yep. That'll do it for today. And then right on here, we will return you to your regularly scheduled Radiolab. More of that next week. Thanks for listening.

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...

Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton.

Hi, this is Ellie from Cleveland, Ohio. Leadership support for Radiolab science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, Assignments Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.