Decoder Ring: The Wrongest Bird in Movie History
51:41 Share

Hey there, Ryan Reynolds here. It's a new year and you know what that means. No, not the diet. Resolutions.

Before we begin, this episode contains some adult language.

Yeah, have either of you ever done this before? No.

This summer, Dakota Ring producer Max Friedman and I headed to Brooklyn's Prospect Park to meet up with Slate's culture editor, Forrest Wickman. Why don't we go towards the boathouse area, the Audubon Center, and camp out there for a minute? Because right now all we have is cars and house sparrows. Forrest is wearing a backpack on his back, binoculars around his neck, and a camera over his shoulder. It's his birdwatching getup, because that's what we were going to do.

Birdwatch. There's an egret flying over, sorry. Great egret flying to the left. Oh, wow, it's so fast. Yeah, that's why they're called great egrets. Like a lot of people, Forrest got into birdwatching during the pandemic. When Forrest gets into something, he's not a halfway kind of person. When he got into movies, he turned thinking about movies into his job. When he started to run, he was doing half marathons in no time.

And when he got into birds, well, now he goes out just about every morning. At the height of migration, I like to get out really early. Like when? If it's like May 15th and I get out at 6 a.m., I can bird for four hours and see like 80 species of birds before work starts. And it's super fun.

As someone who can basically only recognize pigeons, it was amazing to me how many birds Forrest could spot. So there's an eastern kingbird on the end of, see this downed tree that reaches out into the water? It's kind of black or gray on the back and white around the belly, and there's like a white tip on the tail. As we were walking, Forrest would sometimes get a faraway look in his eyes and concentrate, shut out the trucks and the planes and the people.

to really listen to the birds. That's the song Sparrow. I think of it as almost like a dial-up modem. It has like a few different phases to the song.

You've got mail. He was seeing things, but also hearing things that I never would have noticed. It is a slightly consciousness-altering experience because once you start tuning in to everything that's around you, so I'm hearing American Goldfinches singing right now, and that's a warbling vireo that just sang over there. So you have a kind of entire track of your brain that is tuning into that. Does that feel like... It feels like you're in The Matrix. Does it?

A little bit. You know those scenes where they're seeing all of the codes, but they can read the code? If you get good at ear birding, if you get good at kind of recognizing bird songs and bird calls, it feels a little like you're in the Matrix. And now that Forrest is in the Matrix, it affects his whole life. Bird calls are everywhere, just like birds. Not just outside, but inside too. Like even at the movies.

And it's actually something that happened in a movie that inspired Forrest and I to go on this bird walk in the first place. Movies are often wrong about birds. They rarely sound, look, or behave like they should. But the same way you learn to accept that every phone number in every movie starts with 555, if you're a birder, you learn to accept that every bald eagle in every movie screeches like a red-tailed hawk.

Like any good moviegoer, you suspend your disbelief. But there's one bird in one scene in one movie that has tormented me. It has kept me up at nights. It has had me scouring the internet. It has had me questioning the competence and intentions of a wide array of seemingly devoted, certainly well-compensated filmmaking professionals. The most elite crime-fighting force ever assembled.

Good morning, angels. Good morning, Charlie. That's right. I believe the film Charlie's Angels contains the wrongest bird in the history of cinema.

This is Decoder Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. And I'm Forrest Wickman. There is a bird in the film Charlie's Angels that makes absolutely no sense. It is elaborately, even ornately wrong. And it has haunted not just me, but the birding community at large for almost a quarter of a century. So Forrest came to us and asked if he could investigate this catastrophe for decodering. And you know we said yes.

And so I embarked upon a wild goose chase to understand how and why this Frankensteined monstrosity of a bird was allowed to take flight. Forrest talked to script doctors, scoured legal statutes, he electronically analyzed bird calls, all to figure out who laid this giant egg. So today on Dakota Ring, why can't hundreds of people with $100 million accurately portray a single bird?

This podcast is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.

You chose to hit play on this podcast today? Smart choice. Progressive loves to help people make smart choices, and that's why they offer a tool called AutoQuote Explorer that allows you to compare your Progressive car insurance quote with rates from other companies, so you can save time on the research and could enjoy savings when you choose the best rate for you. Give it a try after this episode at Progressive.com, Progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates. Not available in all states and situations, prices vary based on how you buy.

At Sierra, you'll always find apparel, footwear, and gear for 20 to 60% less than department and specialty store prices. But right now it's clearance time, so you can save even more on everything you need to get active and outside. Visit your local Sierra store today. Forrest is going to fly off with the rest of this episode. So I just want to say right up front that I do not consider myself a pedantic person, or not very pedantic. I don't go to movies looking to nitpick them or the birds they contain.

But then I watched Charlie's Angels, and I could no longer just move on with my life. Charlie's Angels started as a hit 1970s TV show about a trio of crime-fighting women. In 2000, it was rebooted as a movie, helmed by a music video director known as McGee.

It stars Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore, and Lucy Liu, who are trying to save the world from what else but a tech billionaire. I'll tap the signal from the roof. I'm gonna go deal with Knox. The scene that drives me cuckoo, the one that aggressively flouts all bird logic, happens right before the big action finale.

At this point, the Angels seem done for. Their headquarters has just been blown up, and their beloved helper Bosley, played by Bill Murray, has been kidnapped and trapped in a prison cell God knows where. Oh my God, Bosley! But it turns out Bosley has a radio transmitter implanted in his tooth. And so, as the Angels wade through the flaming wreckage of their old offices, they hear a familiar voice. Angel, help me! Bosley? I'm trying to find my voice!

"Draw some triangles or something!" But at first, the angels have no idea how to find him. "He could be anywhere this half of North America." And then, a clue appears. A bird flies to the window of Bosley's cell. "Jack, tell him where I am." "Oh, boy." "It's a Cynopygmaea! Meet that hatch!"

That's Cameron Diaz's character, Natalie, supposedly a bird expert. "They only live in one place!" "Bell!" And so, with that one bit of bird song and Natalie's expertise, the angels are able to get to Carmel, free Bosley from his prison cell, and save the day. "Nice work, Natalie." "Thanks, Bosley!" Like most of the movie, the scene is knowingly dumb and very fun. And yet it is absolutely riddled with errors.

The problems with it are as follows: 1. The pygmy nuthatch could not have revealed Bosley's location. It does not, quote, "only live in one place." I've personally seen pygmy nuthatches in at least three states, and it can even be found in parts of Canada and Mexico.

Two, the bird shown on screen is not a pygmy nuthatch. The pygmy nuthatch is a tiny, drab, almost gray scale bird, so small it could fit inside a roll of toilet paper. Instead, what's on screen is a Venezuelan trupial, which is black and neon orange, almost six times the size of a pygmy nuthatch, and also not found in Carmel. Three, and this might be the most baffling thing,

The bird heard on the soundtrack is neither a pygmy nuthatch nor a Venezuelan trupial. It's an unknown third bird whose identity has befuddled birders for years.

To summarize, the bird in this scene does not live where it's supposed to, look like it's supposed to, or sound like it's supposed to. To put this in terms of mammals, it's as if a sloth climbed to Bill Murray's window, howled like some sort of unknown species of canine, and then Cameron Diaz identified the howl as a sea otter, saying that sea otters only live in one place on Earth: Carmel, California.

For anyone who knows anything about birds, this scene is a disgrace on a scale that's simply impossible to ignore. The bird involved is not some background figure. It is front and center, strutting around so shamelessly that the first time I saw it, I honestly thought that the filmmakers might be trolling me, that they might be flipping me and others like me the bird.

But I am a journalist, and as such, it is my first responsibility to get the facts. To allow that perhaps the scene is a disaster because of something other than malevolence or ignorance or incompetence. So I decided I needed to methodically make my way through each and every absurd error in the scene to understand how it had been allowed to stand. And I was going to start with the very first one.

Who introduced a pygmy nuthatch into the script and had the temerity to say it only lived in Carmel? So when you emailed me, I had no recollection of a bird being in the movie at all. Our first suspect was the man who conceived of the scene, screenwriter John August. He was hired to write Charlie's Angels back in 1998. It was a challenging assignment.

It's one of the most difficult things I ever had to write because every scene has to do 19 things. Those things included servicing the storylines and romances of all three angels plus Bosley, all while keeping the complicated plot moving forward and being both funny and action-packed. It was so involved, John swiftly copped to not giving a hoot about the bird.

I would say given the many complexities of the Charlie's Angels script, 100% scientific accuracy, burger accuracy was not a priority. Still, John didn't remember writing the words "pigmy nuthatch" into the script himself, though he admitted it was possible he had. So I asked John, who keeps meticulous records, if he was willing to show us his very first draft of the script to see where it all went wrong. First draft A. Let's see if I can get this to open.

But as he looked closely at the script, it began to seem like his quasi-confession had been premature. Oh, so I can talk you through here. So initial scene, I'm seeing Bosley whistles to a bright red songbird who's landed on the windowsill. The bird whistles back. So it was red at one point. Natalie says, that's an iwi. They only live in one place. And Alex says, Hawaii.

So the pygmy nuthatch was not the bird John had started with. And the bird that John had started with, it was absolutely ornithologically accurate. The i'iwi really is a bright red songbird, and it really does only live in Hawaii. But for logistical reasons, the location of the scene kept changing. Instead of Hawaii, they were going to shoot somewhere closer to Hollywood. So the i'iwi flew out the window, and John had to pick a new bird.

October 26th, 1999, scene 121, Bosley whistles to a blue and white songbird that has landed on the windowsill. The bird whistles back. Natalie says, that's a loggerhead shrike. Lanius, Ludwig, Ganttis, and Jothi, they only live in one place, Catalina. So this wasn't as on point as the Eevee. A loggerhead shrike isn't blue.

But the Latin name that the script gives, it belongs to a subspecies, the island loggerhead shrike, which really was only known to be in Catalina. And, okay, some other islands nearby. Here's a little bit of my defense. It's early internet, so I probably had to actually look it up in a book or something about what are birds and what would birds look like. So John had tried to get it right. And yet at some point, the bird had really jumped the shark. What had gone wrong?

Turns out, John left the movie. We had a reading maybe a month before production started, and that reading went disastrously bad. People started freaking out about stuff. And at that point, I left the project, and maybe like 11 different writers came on and did like a week or two of work during production.

It was actually a whopping 17 writers who ended up working on the script. In the words of a Los Angeles Times article, "Never has so much top-flight talent been put to work on such a trifle."

It was one of those really challenging movies where the script kept getting rewritten. There's what's called revision pages. And so if you are adding something new to a script, you put those pages out in a different color sheet of paper. So first it's blue revisions, then pink revisions, then yellow revisions. They went through the color rainbow so many times, it was like double cherry revisions by the time the movie stopped shooting. So whenever "Pygmy Nuthatch" entered the script,

It must have been on one of those colored revision pages written by one of the other 16 screenwriters who worked on this movie. That meant there were 16 other suspects to question.

Any one of them could have written in the pygmy knot hatch. I started with Zach Penn. There was and still is this tendency to like throw screenwriters at the problem without regard to money or how efficient a use of time it is. I mean, it doesn't make any sense, but it's very lucrative for all the writers. So you kind of don't complain about it. Zach has worked on some of the biggest action franchises of the past three decades.

decades, including the X-Men and Avengers movies. And I had reached out to him because I had a hunch his rewrites had touched on the bird.

His name was on a later draft of the script I found online, where the bird had been changed to something even worse: a blue-spotted egret, which isn't a real bird at all. I figured anyone who had the gall to straight up invent a bird could have also been the perpetrator behind our pygmy nuthatch. You know, when I was a kid, I actually had like a birdwatching book and like, I remember like black-capped chickadees and things like that, but

No, I couldn't give less of a shit about birds. Until you told me a blue-spotted egret wasn't a real bird, I had no idea that it wasn't. Despite his rather cavalier attitude towards some of our world's most beautiful creatures, Zach denied responsibility for the bogus blue-spotted egret. He also didn't think that he came up with the pygmy nuthatch, and he didn't know who had.

But just as I began to mentally prepare to reach out to the other 15 screenwriters, Zach told me that even though he didn't know the identity of the Guilty Party, he was pretty sure he knew their motive. Charlie's Angels was pretty betwixt and between, and that leads to a lot of people throwing a lot of shit at the screen trying to find something that sticks.

It's so hard writing a comedy in the studio system because everybody gets bored and thinks the script isn't funny anymore because this is the 18th draft they've read.

All those writers were desperate for a bird that could make their bosses laugh, and could keep them laughing on the 18th read. And Zach thinks the pygmy nuthatch's name makes it uniquely qualified in that regard. If somebody had said, you know what, bird, you're talking to a pygmy nuthatch, I would have been like, that's fucking good. Let's use pygmy nuthatch. I had to admit, he was right. After all, it contains the word nut.

Like most conspiracies, my guess is it's just the chaos is what led to this. Chaos and comedy were the true culprits. And so out had gone the accurate Eevee, the semi-accurate Shrike, even the godforsaken blue-spotted Egret, and in came the pygmy nuthatch. But for the life of me, I still could not understand. Why didn't they then use that bird in the movie?

If you name your bird a pygmy nuthatch, why not cast a pygmy nuthatch? When we come back, I find out who's responsible by getting a witness to the film shoot to sing like a canary. I'm Nicola Coughlin, and for BBC Radio 4, this is History's Youngest Heroes.

Hi, it's Carvel from Slate's How To Podcast. Are you ready for a fresh start in 2025?

To celebrate the new year, Slate is offering an extended free trial of Slate Plus exclusively on Apple Podcasts. As a Slate Plus member, you'll get ad-free listening on every Slate show, solve life's toughest problems on How To, get advice you actually want to follow on Dear Prudence, keep your pulse on the zeitgeist with Culture Gab Fest, and navigate the big questions of life with Death, Sex, and Money, all uninterrupted.

Plus, starting this month, HowTo is releasing bi-weekly bonus episodes exclusively for Slate Plus members. That means more advice, more experts, and more stories to help you tackle life's challenges head on. Don't miss out. Try Slate Plus for free now on Apple Podcasts or visit slate.com slash howtoplus to get access wherever you listen.

Okay, so the screenwriters had introduced the name pygmy nuthatch to be funny. But then someone had to go get an actual bird. So there's a lot of species of birds you just wouldn't ever want to use. They just can't handle it.

Gwen Dill has been wrangling all sorts of animals, not just birds, for 30 years. If a bird gets stressed, they go poof, and they just like poof out all their feathers. They lose all their feathers, and then what do you do? Gwen was the animal trainer on Charlie's Angels. And as such, she was responsible for finding the pygmy nuthatch specified in the screenplay and putting it in front of a camera. But as you know, the bird on screen is decidedly not a pygmy nuthatch. Was she to blame?

That wasn't our decision. It turns out the drab gray pygmy nuthatch did not have the look that producers and director were going for. They wanted something very tropical because it was supposed to give it away that he's on this island. So keeping that in mind, they were kind of looking for vibrant, a little bit spectacular, but had to be a small enough bird to kind of fly in through the window, do the song and then fly out.

So Gwen had to find birds that would fit the bill and share them with the production team. We sent pictures initially. It's kind of like sending headshots of actors. We do the same thing. So we send them an array of pictures and then they kind of pick and choose whether it be because of their ability or look. Now, if I were an animal casting director, I would have at least included a headshot of the pygmy nuthatch in this batch of pictures. I mean, why not give truth a chance?

Or that's what I thought, until I learned something unexpected. We cannot use a lot of birds that are indigenous to the United States, so it's not that easy. It turns out no animal handler would ever have included a pygmy nuthatch, because they are not just small, drab, and unlikely to grab a viewer's eye. They are also illegal to cast in a movie. And the reason for this goes back more than 100 years. ♪

People in the late 19th century and early 20th century were just killing birds wholesale. Nick Lund works for Maine Audubon and has written many articles about birding. There were not the same rules that there are now about hunting regulations, hunting season, bag limits, that kind of thing. And birds were just getting decimated.

Some of this was for food, but people were eating much more than turkeys and pheasants and ducks. They were eating sparrows, grebes, loons, thrushes, grackles, ibises, pelicans, bobolinks, woodpeckers, and more. In one of John James Audubon's books, he reported that the snowy owl tastes like chicken.

And birds were not only being killed for food or sport. They were being killed for women's hats. There was this giant millinery trade. And so people were killing birds for their feathers to make these dumb looking hats that were super popular at the time. And killing giant, you know, large amounts of populations of herons and egrets and things for their feathers to decorate hats.

Can you describe some of these hats? They're the dumbest things I've ever seen. You know, it's one thing to think about, oh, I have a hat maybe with a feather sticking out. No, this was like taxidermied birds plopped onto a hat, the entire dead bird just on a hat. It was like if you took Bjork's infamous swan dress and put it on her head and made it out of an actual swan.

At first, Americans weren't too concerned about what all this carnage meant for bird populations. In the 1800s, scientists were still debating whether it was even possible for a species to go extinct. Audubon himself insisted that North American birds were so numerous that, at least with our birds, it could never happen. But then came the tragic case of the passenger pigeon.

The passenger pigeon had once been so plentiful across North America that Audubon described them blotting out the sun for days. But they were massacred by the thousands. And in 1914, a passenger pigeon named Martha, the last known member of her species, died alone at the Cincinnati Zoo. There was powerful outrage about all of this slaughter, but especially about the hats.

And while these hats were mostly worn by women, the fight against the hats was also largely led by women. It actually makes me laugh because, you know, it's such a dumb sort of fashion trend. And it resulted in all these great laws, including the founding of Audubon societies. One of these laws is called the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

It was passed in 1918. And it's this sort of interesting, wide-ranging, broad law that protects migratory birds. It basically prevents people from harming, taking, killing, capturing native birds in the United States. The law has had humongous positive impacts.

That egret that Willa and I saw soaring over Brooklyn that made her exclaim in wonder, that was there because of this law. We have them here in Maine, all over the place, or all over the East Coast, all over the country in great numbers because we stopped that hunting because of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. ♪

But the law also says that you can't keep our native birds as pets. And though we may not be used to thinking of animals in movies as pets, that's what they are. Working pets. What that means is you can't keep them as actors. You can't force them to be actors. And so when a company wants to put a bird on TV in the United States, they can't use a native species. And a pygmy nuthatch is a native species, a bird covered by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

So even if anyone involved in Charlie's Angels had wanted to use a drab little pygmy nuthatch in the movie, they couldn't have. They were always going to have to use another bird. And once that's true, I mean, why not get a bird that has real star quality? And so that's exactly what Gwyn Dill, the animal handler, did.

In fact, she got two of them. Jack and Jill. They were brother and sister. Did both of them appear in the movie? Is this like a Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen scenario? Yes.

Jack and Jill were Venezuelan trupials, resplendent birds the color of a tangerine, with a shiny black hood, a sky-blue teardrop around each eye, and a blazing lightning bolt across each wing. I think I still have scars from the trupials. They knew right where your cuticle was, and they would take those sharp beaks, and they'd go, wah, wah, wah, wah, and they'd just make you bleed until you, like, we'd have, like, band-aids around all of our fingers, you know?

So now I knew why screenwriters would write in a pygmy nuthatch, and why, to play one, an animal handler had to bring in a foreign import. But even once the filmmakers were stuck with the name they picked for fun, and the South American stand-ins that they were legally obligated to cast, they still could have made the bird sound like an actual pygmy nuthatch, right? Or even like a Venezuelan trupial? But in fact, they did neither.

They cast a third bird to lend its voice, one that nobody has been able to identify. And that means that there were actually two mysteries left. Why on earth did they do that? And what bird was it?

I'm Candice Lim, and I'm the host of ICYMI, Slate's podcast about internet culture. My guests and I are like your internet historians of the past, present, and future. Fire Festival as one of these monocultural internet events of the good, the bad, and the truly unhinged.

I would rather work at Walmart on Black Friday. From nuanced takes to trending stories to ones you wish you heard about. In case you missed it, that's ICYMI, the podcast that's extremely online so you don't have to be. Follow now wherever you're listening. It's time for another round.

May you live in interesting times. Well, I don't think we have a choice, Mary. Trump's back. And this time, he's got way fewer restraints. And a literal playbook for MAGA-ifying the United States. For most of human history, people have lived under kings and queens, and not everybody believes that there's anything wrong with that. All this can be overwhelming. But you can't afford to not pay attention. That's where What Next comes in.

We are a new kind of daily news podcast, fast enough to keep up and careful enough to take a step back and think. Democracy is not a thing that we did and now have to protect and dust off. It's a thing that we still have it within ourselves to accomplish. The next four years are going to be a roller coaster. You need someone there to help you figure out what next. Follow and listen to What Next wherever you get your podcasts.

So here I was still on the case. The case of the nonsensical bird call. I had been wondering who the hell voices the pygmy nuthatch since the moment I first saw Charlie's Angels. And it wasn't just me. For decades, birders have been flocking to the internet to point out the problems with this scene.

blogging about it, tweeting about it, posting it to forums and message boards and IMDb goofs and MovieMistakes.com, mentioning it everywhere from local newspapers to W Magazine. But while these enraged bird lovers have long identified the Hollywood imposter on screen as a Venezuelan trupial, none of them have ever been able to identify the bird we hear. And with just my ear, I couldn't either.

But I was going to figure this out one way or another. I started by reaching out to the crew member who ought to know best. "Hi, I'm Michael Benavente. I was the supervising sound editor of the film. And the sequel." Full throttle, of course. Michael told me right up front that not only did he not remember much about the bird, it

It really wasn't a priority at the time. I wish I could give you an interesting answer. Yes, of course. But it really doesn't. To be honest, that sound was a very minor part of the film. I know it has a plot point and pays off and that kind of stuff. But there was so much other stuff going on with sword fights and, you know, just big action sequences. ♪

But I'd come this far, and I wasn't going to take indifference for an answer. So I asked him to rewatch the scene with me. "Okay, great." "Come on, Bosley, tell us where you are." "It smells, actually, like the ocean." "I haven't seen that in a long time." After I played it for him, some things did start to click in. One was that in the context of the scene, an accurate sound effect wouldn't have felt right.

Quite frankly, realistic doesn't always play dramatically or as interesting. You know, you want to, you know, punch things up and make them sound fun. The bird is helping the angel set Bosley free. It doesn't need to sound realistic. It needs to sound like deliverance. And for what it's worth, that is not the sound of a Venezuelan trupial. A Venezuelan trupial sounds more like a car alarm.

And the song of a real pygmy nuthatch has problems too. Namely, it sounds like it's being chewed up like a squeaky toy. Yeah, a lot of times the real thing just isn't cutting it. So Michael's team needed to deliver a bird song that was more uplifting and joyful. But there was another thing. Not only did they have to match the song to the bird on screen, they had to match it to one of the humans, Cameron Diaz.

See, if you listen very closely to the sound effect, there's this rising, whistled trill at the end that repeats three times. Oh! What? But the third time you hear it, it's actually Cameron Diaz's character whistling a pitch-perfect imitation of the bird, blowing through her hands like they're a flute. Whistling

It's a Cetopygmaea! And that's the thing that Michael Benevente was focused on. Basically, I would be more concerned about making sure it looked like it was coming out of her mouth. So he had to find a song that would line up with what had already been filmed. So I would get that bird, I would sync that up, edit that so it worked with her, cut her first, and then use that same rhythm and everything for the bird.

So now I knew why they hadn't used the song of a pygmy nuthatch or a Venezuelan trupial. But that's where I hit a dead end. Michael had no idea what bird they had used instead. Still, I was undeterred. Because I had a bird in the hand, aka the guy who literally wrote the book on bird sounds.

I am not allowed by my friends and family to comment on the bird sounds when we are watching movies or TV because they have had enough of my commentary. Nathan Pieplow is a self-described obsessive birder who put together the field guide to bird sounds using a method that relies not on our ears but on our eyes. The beautiful thing now that you can do is you can create what we call spectrograms,

which are computer-generated pictures of the sound. A spectrogram is a visual representation of an audio recording. And in Nathan's field guides, they look like notes on a staff. It's sheet music for birders. With practice, you can learn how to read the spectrograms so that you can look at the picture and you'll know what it sounds like. Or the other way around, if you hear a bird sound, you can picture what it's going to look like.

All of this practice has made Nathan an excellent ear birder. And you don't have to take my word for it, because my producer Max and I, we devised a little test. From Brooklyn, the podcasting capital of the world, it's Name That Bird! Max, would you play for us our first bird? The main bird that was vocalizing there that was screaming was a red-tailed hawk. Correct. Okay.

In the movies, when an eagle opens its mouth, what usually comes out is that scream of the red-tailed hawk that we heard earlier. But what we just heard is what bald eagles actually sound like in real life. Now I'm thinking we're in Hawaii. And now I'm thinking that we just heard an eevee. I think that was a pygmy nuthatch.

As you've just heard, I had reason to be confident in Nathan's ear birding. I was sure the answer was within our grasp. Max, could you play our mystery bird? Tell him where I am. Oh! What? That? I don't recognize that bird sound. So my bird in the hand, it turned out to be a turkey. This bird was really, really ridiculously hard to identify.

And as I listened to it over and over, I kept circling back to that part that repeats at the end, that Cameron Diaz whistles back perfectly. It's weird because it repeats exactly. And I mean exactly, in a way that sounds too uncanny, too mechanical to be the work of any real bird. Was it possible it wasn't the call of a real bird? Could it be synthesized by a machine? There was only one thing to do: ask another machine.

My name is Drew Weber. I'm the Merlin project manager. Drew is obviously not a machine, but Merlin is. I like to call it kind of like your personalized birding coach. Merlin is an app that has been downloaded more than 10 million times that's basically Shazam for birds. I'd already tried using Merlin on Charlie's Angels, but the app had been just as bewildered as the rest of us.

But Drew explained that the app on my phone would never identify this sound for me. And that's by design. By default, Merlin's only going to show you results for your location and your time of year. But then he told me there's another, more powerful version of the software. Internally, we have like a, we call it the dev app, and it allows us to toggle off the various filtering for location and time of year.

So Drew set loose his behind-the-scenes version of Merlin on Charlie's Angels. And he got a hit. The song that we're hearing is a fox sparrow. I was dumbfounded. We have fox sparrows in Brooklyn. If the bird in Charlie's Angels was a fox sparrow, why hadn't I been able to identify the song on my own? For that matter, why hadn't my version of Merlin?

But before I threw my phone across the room and my ego completely crumbled, Drew told me that the fox sparrow in Charlie's Angels was no New Yorker. It sounds like the thick-billed subspecies from California. This is what a thick-billed fox sparrow sounds like. I had to admit, it sounded pretty close, but I still wasn't sure it was quite right, and I wanted a second human opinion.

So I emailed this ID to Nathan Pieplow, the bird call expert. He wrote back, asking me to give him a call. Well, when I got your email about this, I made a spectrogram of the bird that's singing in Charlie's Angels. So you kind of turned the sound and you made it into like a picture or like a chart that you can look at. Exactly.

And so I started thinking maybe, maybe I could actually find the source recording that this was made from. Turns out, when Nathan was researching his field guide to bird sounds, he had fed a vast library of field recordings of birds into a computer program to turn them into spectrograms. Spectrograms he still had. So I went to the folder called Thick Build Foxborough and within about two minutes,

I had found the exact individual bird that was recorded

And used in Charlie's Angels. So not only the species, not only the subspecies, but the exact individual bird that we hear in the movie. Yes. Is there like a date and a location? It is a thick-billed fox sparrow that was recorded by Thomas G. Sander on June 2nd, 1990 at the Black Pine Spring Campground in the Deschutes National Forest in Oregon. Fox sparrow.

Jack, tell him where I am. It was the smoking gun tape. I had goosebumps. We had gotten our bird.

And then it got even better. Using spectrograms, Nathan could explain to me what was going on with that weirdly mechanical series of trills at the end. It was just another snippet of a different song from that same individual fox sparrow, looped three times over so Cameron Diaz could perform it. It's a Cynopygmaea! A pygmy bed hatch!

So at this point, I was feeling pretty satisfied with all I'd been able to uncover. And it was starting to make me see things a little differently.

I had begun this investigation thinking that everyone involved in this movie just didn't care about birds. But now I knew that wasn't the case. I mean, they didn't really care about birds. But rather than being careless or obtuse or lazy, they had each been trying to solve a problem and had stretched themselves to do so creatively. And I could understand and even admire that. But I couldn't let it obscure the big picture.

The bird in Charlie's Angels was still a mess. As resourceful as everyone had been, their individual choices did not add up. And there is one person on a movie who was supposed to keep that from happening. One person who was supposed to be taking in the bird's eye view. And so I needed to go to that person and demand an explanation. I needed to talk to the director. I'm McG, which is short for McGinty.

I'm a 28 year old Leo and I enjoy interspecies friendship. No, I'm kidding. In fact, today's my birthday. I'm 56 sadly.

Before Charlie's Angels, McG was best known for music videos, like the one for All-Star by Smash Mouth. He's since gone on to direct the fourth movie in the Terminator franchise and, as of a few weeks ago, the number one movie on Netflix. But Charlie's Angels is what made McG McG. And I was curious if any of this bird drama had even registered with him. With the greatest respect, I'm the only person to speak on this issue. It turns out McG remembered everything.

He had total recall of the scene, right down to the bird's Latin name. And he was well aware that there was a problem with using that song. The call is very different of a Sidibea than the call reflected in the film. This was my guy. He got it. And not only had he given a hoot, he tried to make it right.

Before deciding on the two Venezuelan trupials he got from Gwynne Dill, the animal wrangler, he'd actually wanted to cast a bird that looked a lot more like a real pygmy nuthatch. But that bird wouldn't fly. It had a very bright white underbelly. And on top of having difficulty hitting its mark, the white underbelly was casting a bounce onto Bill Murray's face that was unsavory to the director of photography,

Faced with using a less accurate bird, he had then tried to justify the wrongness of said bird with a character detail. What people don't realize is a subtext of the Natalie character is that she has synesthesia. Ah. And she hears things differently. So differently, I guess, that her synesthesia not only translates sounds into visuals, it translates bird calls into other bird calls, and what we hear is what she hears in her mind?

But this synesthesia storyline was a little nutty, and it had not made it into the movie. Boy, is that a deep cut that never got paid off. At this point, it saddens me a little to say McG, like everyone else, had given up.

The movie was over budget, and he was under a lot of pressure. I was nearly fired off that movie, you know, no less than six or eight times. It was just so colorful and weird and buoyant and effervescent. And, you know, the studio brass at the time was like, what the fuck is this?

So he was going to do whatever it took to get the shot. You can't spend 90 minutes trying to get the bird to sit on the windowsill to interact with Bill Murray. So if one bird can do it, that bird, you know, that bird's going in. And the pygmy nuthatch did have something going for it. Its name. It was wrong in all sorts of ways, but the tone, the spirit, the word nut, it had that special something.

McG knew it the first time he heard it. "What a great name. What a great name, we gotta do it. It felt so Charlie's Angels." And McG, he definitely knew what felt like Charlie's Angels. Charlie's Angels, with its goofball mix of action and comedy and knowing stupidity, became a franchise-launching hit, earning good reviews and one of the highest-grossing opening weekends of all time for a first-time director. And, though I hate to admit it, it did it all with a janky bird.

Because as I've learned, you can't make a movie without breaking some eggs. "We desperately wanted to get it right, but then with great regularity, reality shows up and kicks you in the ass." I knew with this scene what "right" meant to me. But I am not too stubborn to admit that the people actually working on the film got it right in so many other ways.

They picked a bird name that would make you laugh, a bird actor who would hit his marks and catch your eye, a bird song that would sound like hope. For years, I thought I had caught the movie out in this egregious mistake. But maybe I was the bird brain. Maybe it was time for me to eat crow. Maybe the wrongest bird in the history of the movies. Maybe it's just right. Everybody's heard about bird food.

This is Decoder Ring. I'm Forrest Wickman. And I'm Willa Paskin. I want to tell you about a special Decoder Ring bonus episode for Slate Plus members that's available right now, just in time for Halloween. Spooky season feels like it's getting bigger and bigger every year, and I wanted to know how that had happened. So I spoke with Lisa Morton, an expert on the history of Halloween.

We start all the way back in Celtic prehistory and trace how the holiday came to involve costumes, candy, and frights, none of which it started with. Here's a sneak peek.

Was there a time you could get a trick? Like now, you know, it's like trick or treat. You just get a treat. There's no like nasty thing on offer. Was there? Well, what the phrase breaks down to is not I am asking you for either a trick or treat, but I am going to play a trick if you don't give me a treat. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. It's like a threat. Exactly right. It's a threat.

If you aren't already a Slate Plus member, you can subscribe now on Apple Podcasts by clicking Try Free at the top of the Decoder Ring show page.

or visit slate.com slash decoder plus to get access wherever you listen. We're going to be releasing bonus episodes regularly, including answers to your mailbag questions, so sign up now. Don't forget, Slate Plus members also get to listen to our show and every other Slate podcast without any ads.

and you'll get unlimited access to Slate's website. Again, you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts by clicking Try Free or visit slate.com slash decoder plus to sign up. If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us at decoderring at slate.com.

This episode was written and reported by Forrest Wickman. It was edited by me. It was produced by Max Friedman. Decoder Ring is produced by me, Max, Evan Chung, and Katie Shepard, with help from Sophie Codner. Derek John is executive producer. Merrick Jacob is senior technical director. We'd like to thank Stephen Flick, Eleanor Kagan, Christopher King, and Robert L. Friedman.

If you haven't yet, please subscribe and rate our feed in Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And even better, tell your friends. And we'll see you in two weeks.

Hi, I'm Josh Levine. My podcast, The Queen, tells the story of Linda Taylor. She was a con artist, a kidnapper, and maybe even a murderer. She was also given the title The Welfare Queen, and her story was used by Ronald Reagan to justify slashing aid to the poor.

Now it's time to hear her real story. Over the course of four episodes, you'll find out what was done to Linda Taylor, what she did to others, and what was done in her name. The great lesson of this for me is that people will come to their own conclusions based on what their prejudices are. Subscribe to The Queen on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening right now.