This audio story is brought to you by BirdNote, a partner of the 吃瓜黑料. BirdNote episodes air daily on public radio stations nationwide. 9673 Transcript: Some birds are just misunderstood and have been for centuries. Take the Eared Grebe, for example. The earliest description in the North American literature—dating from 1577 and based on Aztec observations—notes, “Its food is its feathers, only sometimes it eats fish.” Strange as it sounds, grebes do indeed eat their own feathers. Eared Grebes eat mainly brine shrimp and aquatic insects, which have rigid exoskeletons, making them both tough to digest and potentially damaging to the intestines. So, grebes evolved to use their feathers as a way to slow down digestion. After the bird swallows them, the feathers enter a three-part stomach — first a storage chamber, then a gizzard, and lastly a pouch. The feathers form dense balls in both the gizzard and final pouch and appear to slow the...