Matt Kaplan

speaker

87 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 16 Jun

Matt Kaplan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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The Intelligence from The Economist · No big deal: murky Iran-war negotiations · 26 May 2026 podcast

A black crouse is a member of the chicken family.

They have bright red patches on top of their heads.

And they're found all over northern Europe and Asia, much of the Nordic countries and Russia, but they have this tiny isolated population in the Alps.

And their numbers there have been diminishing for years.

And particularly notable are their populations around ski resorts.

When there are ski lifts present, grouse populations seem to suffer particularly.

Particularly badly, and that bonded to the observation of grouse smacking into the lifts suggests that there is a problem.

To deal with the issue of the grouse smacking into chairlifts, ski companies and resorts have been putting up warning signs all over their cables for their chairlifts.

These signs have varied in size from 3.5 to 15 centimeters in width.

They're almost always bright red because the bird colliding with the chairlift has bright red patches on its head.

So everyone in their

Dog has assumed, well, if we make the warning signs red, the grouse will see them and not fly into the chair lifts.

But as these researchers have published in experimental biology recently, that has not been working.

Um, the numbers continue to drop.

And so the quest was on to figure out what can these grouse actually see.

They put the grouse through a whole bunch of visual experiments, looking at, you know, can they see contrast?

What colors can they see?

And on the whole, their vision stinks.

They don't see contrast very well, but they can see it.

They can see blue, they can see yellow, they can see purple, they can even see ultraviolet.

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