In a 2014 interview on the NPR interview program "Fresh Air with Terry Gross," O'Dowd told Gross that before he was an actor he worked at a call center, and one of his jobs was making solicitation calls for a well known wildlife charity. He said that the endangered animals that he was supposed to tell potential donors about--like New Guinean bats or newts from New Zealand--were unappealing to people, so he started making up fake endangered animals that he thought would be more attractive to them. One was a "tiger swan," which he described as "essentially a swan with the markings of a Bengal"; one was "some kind of flying dolphin".
