What is the function of the footnotes throughout Fuzz?

Throughout, Fuzz, Roach includes footnotes to both expand her research and develop a conversational tone with her reader. In these postscripts, the author includes factoids that are not immediately pertinent to her research but are amusing or thought-provoking asides. By way of example, in “The Gulls of St. Peter’s” when Roach questions if gulls are motivated by dickish personalities, in the corresponding footnote she states that gulls “don’t have dicks. Like most birds, gulls mate by aligning their cloacal openings. The ornithological term for this is ‘the cloacal kiss’. Which makes bird sex sound sweet and demure, until you remember that they also excrete through their cloaca” (225). While the particulars of gull mating are not necessarily relevant to her inquiry of animal churlishness, the footnote serves as a colloquial aside to the reader. She speaks to...