This episode will have you outside with a sharpened stake, a hammer, a slab of metal and an empty coffee can. That’s right, we’re going to be talking about charming worms right out of the ground and explaining the science behind how it works. ‘Cause it DOES work and you’re going to want to try.
Show Notes:
Worm Charming aka worm grunting http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2008/10/21/2396935.htm
Seagulls tap dancing on dirt to scare up worms. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6N93bKtWB6w
Episode Transcript
Welcome to Brain Junk. I’m Amy Barton, and I’m Trace Kerr and it’s time for a Brain Storm.
TK: So I have some truly stellar show notes for this little brainstorm. And it all centers around a video that Zo sent me on Instagram. Seagulls tap dancing on dirt to scare up worms. She was like, have you ever seen this? And it’s a regular looking seagull, you know, white and gray and it’s in grass, but it’s tamped down the grass to where it’s bare dirt and it looks like it’s doing a tap dance. It’s just Dah, Dah, Dah, Dah, Dah, Dah, Dah, Dah. You want put flamenco music in the back, kind of back, back and forth, back and forth. And the title underneath said, seagull making it sound like rain. So worms, worms will come to the surface. And I said, I don’t know about that. So what are the seagulls doing when they’re tapping their little feet? They’re creating vibrations and the worms are coming to the surface. And a lot of people thought that the sound is mimicking rain. So if you put in the seagull thing, one of the first thing that comes up is something called worm charming.
AB: Ooh, I liked that.
TK That he goes to the warm charmers. They are worm. Charming. Oh yes. And then also people can worm charm or as we like to call it, worm grunting.
AB: I am for sure right now in my real life, my son will be late. As soon as he listens to this, he’s like, we’re going to go do some warm, charming. We have to go make this happen.
TK: You have to try worm charming that people do. You drive a wooden stake into the ground and you have a piece of metal, 10 pounds of metal. It looks almost like a wood file. And they get on their knees and they run rump across the top of the wood.
AB: Really?
TK: Yes. And you can see the ground around the base of the wood vibraver yeah, there’s shivering in the thing.
AB: Okay.
TK: Yeah. And then they call that a roofing iron. So they’re running that across the top to create this warbling sound. And I am not kidding. Hundreds of worms come to the surface if you’re in the right place.
AB: I kind of want to try this now.
TK: And there’s, there’s a worm grunting festival in Sop chupy Oh Gosh, sorry Florida. That dates back a hundred years. Hundreds of warm grunterswould apply their skills in the Apalachicola national forest. They would, they were harvesting millions of worms for sport fishing and actually in the 1960s had to close the forest to the warm grunters. AB: Wow.
TK:Because they were concerned that they were going to decimate the worm population. So and watching people do it, they’re making the noise this across the top of the stick and then you see worms shooting out of the dirt. I wanted to try like run, but it looks like they’re running. I know I went and tried it this afternoon and I don’t think I banged my stick into the ground far enough and I didn’t have a big enough piece of metal cause I was running it across the top and I was making vibrations like within an inch of the stick. When you’re watching these people do it with their 10 pound weight, it’s at least a foot around that. You can see the ground jumping and does it like a file? How does it make the, it looks like the piece, it clearly can’t be flat. It has to have some sort...
