If anything, they seem more akin to ancient representations of things like dragons or other mythical creatures.

Yeah, and, and exactly.

And so like when chickens arrived, people were like, uh, one source I was reading sort of said they looked nothing like the drab brown birds that populated the rest of Europe, you know? So people were like, "What is this wonderful, this magical bird that sort of clucks and is a fighting bird and you know, like is fierce and all this sort of stuff?" The thing that I love is there's records of people buried alongside their chickens, and then when we've done studies of the stomach contents of the chicken, it like matched the human [chuckles] and so they were like eating the same food and the chickens had died of old age.

It's not like they were sacrificed.

In some cases they were given their own burial urn that they were buried in, you know, which suggests this sort of real reverence for this, this animal.

But, you know, at some point obviously in that journey, um, you know, that, that relationship fell away and we think it started probably with eating their eggs, you know, and it, and it took centuries for that, that relationship to drop away.

So sort of five hundred years-ish we think.

But I suppose these are a different kind of sentinel species due to not only their own specificities, but also how we encounter them and they're not often thought of as being part of wildlife that registers in the collective consciousness in the same way as, say, magpies, wallabies or possums.

Can you talk a bit about that?

Yeah, so the disease I look at in the book is called Hendra virus, and it's named after the Brisbane suburb called Hendra, which was where the first outbreak of this virus occurred in 1994.

And the first cluster of infections were in racing horses that were kept in a paddock, sort of suburban house there.

And at that time, you know, that city Brisbane, which is sort of in the north of Australia, northeast corner of Australia, was undergoing this huge transformation of urbanisation and population growth and stuff.

And the suburbs were changing.

So more and more people were coming to live in these peri-urban outskirts of Brisbane with their horses.

And in this case, in the mid-90s, in this first outbreak, These horses got really sick.

How effective did this prove to be? I mean, is there now an idea of how you can prevent this spillover? And how much is this idea of bringing in ecologists part of the norm today?

So could you talk to us a bit about, I guess, the impacts of inequality on people and the ways that diseases interact with that?

Yeah, totally.

I mean, you know, so like of those two you mentioned, like valley fever is a, like you said, it's a fungal disease that lives in the soil in parts of southwest U.S., Um, and, uh, it's, it, it, it, uh, infects people's, uh, lungs.

Essentially you breathe in the spores of this fungus, they get kicked up by the wind and you breathe in the fungus.

And most people like it, it doesn't cause any major health problems.

Um, it, uh, sort of gets attended to by your body's immune system.

And then like you have like maybe a mild cold or something, and then you find that's like 90% of people that's, You know, have that and then and then you're immune for life.

And how they're at a higher chance of being exposed to the fungus.

So when it comes to this space, tell me about where bird flu, where H5N1, where it sits in terms of just how destructive we've seen it be over the last few years.

Yeah, it's, it's one of the most devastating, uh, diseases in wildlife in modern history.

The scale and the spread of this disease has been quite extraordinary to see.

So it's traveled around the world at this point.

Its arrival in Australia signals the fact that it's basically landed on every continent in every part of the world, uh, in just five years.

And, um, it's done that by infecting hundreds of bird species globally, in addition to dozens of mammals.

And, um, everywhere it's landed around the world, it's, uh, resulted in mass mortalities in certain species.

And so if bird flu came into existence because of the conditions of modern-day food production, so trying to get maximum profit out of poultry farming, what does that say to you about- the future of zoonotic diseases and the rate that we might see new and different strains emerge?