Wonderful read for the Nature and Environment book group. The language is sometimes a little precious: hippocampus described as “this whiff of tissue”; “a glister of goldfinches”; “a twitch of birders.”
I looked up:
- gökotta – Swedish tradition of getting up early to hear the first birdsong
- kagu (Rhynochetos jubatus) – rare flightless New Caledonian bird
- pigeons are better at the Monty Hall problem than humans
- Cuba uses pigeons to transmit election results from remote mountainous areas
- “in each of a bird’s cone cells is a drop of colored oil that enhances its ability to detect differences between similar colors”
- I was very surprised to hear that house sparrow populations are declining around the world. You wouldn’t know it around here – they thrive!
Short quotes / facts:
- “sexy” syllable: “when a male bird uses his syrinx to sing with two different voices at once”
- A pet monk parakeet “obligingly sat on my shoulder and periodically leaned in to my ear to say, ‘Whisper, whisper, whisper.'”
- “chickadees use their calls like language, complete with syntax that can generate an open-ended number of unique call types” (for example, the number of “dees” indicates the size of an approaching predator – more for smaller, hence more dangerous, predators)
- “A frigate bird with a seven-foot wingspan has a skeleton that weighs less than its feathers”
- mockingbird imitating a canary but not able to deliver the notes as rapidly “clusters the notes and pauses to breathe while still maintaining identical song length”; they regularly imitate as many as 200 different songs
- Quote from the New Yorker so most likely too good to be true: “after weeks of silence, the first words uttered by a Westchester parakeet were, ‘Talk, damn you, talk!’”
- Bowerbirds take seven years to mature, which correlates with their intelligence (learned a lot about them in Evolution of Beauty); females evaluate males in a way “very similar to a search for job candidates” (brief visit, then longer for the finalists)
- white-crowned sparrow flock: “each a single feathered ounce of fortitude”
- “Twilight is a rich source of information for navigating animals of all types. It’s the only period in the day when birds and other animals can combine light-polarization patterns, stars, and magnetic cues.”
- Complexity of mapping/relating odors could have driven the ability to remember relationships between unrelated elements: “for example, the scent of a certain mineral or tree and the direction toward home”
- In some cities, sparrows use cigarette butts in their nests for their ability to repel parasites
- Quoting Richard F. Johnston: “Everything that is is adaptive.”
- “A new study … suggests that, genetically speaking, the turkey is closer to its dinosaur ancestors than any other bird is; its chromosomes have undergone fewer changes than other birds since the days of feathered dinosaurs.”
- Interesting behaviors: crows and others dunking food, skuas stealing milk from lactating seals
Longer quotes
Newborn chicks spatially “map” numbers from left to right, as most humans do (left means less; right means more). This suggests that birds share with us a left-to-right orientation system—a cognitive strategy that underlies our human capacity for higher mathematics. Baby birds can also understand proportion and can learn to choose a target from an array of objects on the basis of its ordinal position (third, eighth, ninth). They can do simple arithmetic, as well, such as addition and subtraction.
Like the black-billed cuckoo a friend saw perched just above a nest of tent caterpillars: The cuckoo waited as the caterpillars climbed out of the nest to scale the tree, then plucked them off one at a time, like sushi from a conveyor belt.
Closely-related birds, the Bajan bullfinch and the black-faced grassquit:
“These two birds are virtual genetic twins with the same ancestor, having diverged probably only a couple of million years ago,” Lefebvre explains. “Both live in the same environment. Both are territorial and share the same social system.” The only difference is that the bullfinch is clever, fearless, and opportunistic; and the grassquit, skittish, deeply conservative, and afraid of nearly everything. … [A grad student] has measured the speed at which the two species will feed from an open cup of seed. The bullfinches find the novel food source in about five seconds, she says. It takes the grassquits five days. “A yogurt top filled with seeds is just too odd for them.”
Quote by naturalist Edmond Selous about flocking birds:
“They circle; now dense like a polished roof, now disseminated like the meshes of some vast all-heaven-sweeping net, now darkening, now flashing out a million rays of light . . . a madness in the sky,” he wrote. “They must think collectively, all at the same time, or at least in streaks or patches—a square yard or so of an idea, a flash out of so many brains.”
An award for nest-building brilliance should go to the long-tailed tit, a common relative of the chickadee that lives in Europe and Asia. Its nest is a flexible bag composed of small-leaved mosses that form hooks, which are woven together with the silk loops of fluffy spider egg cocoons to create a kind of “Velcro.” The little birds work to line the inside of the bag with thousands of small insulating feathers and cover the outside with thousands of small lichen flakes for camouflage, creating a structure made of roughly six thousand separate pieces.
Is there something special in the cognitive toolkits of house sparrows and their like—pigeons, turtledoves, and other so-called synanthropes drawn to settle near humans—a set of mental skills that allows them to thrive in a place no matter how altered or degraded it may be?
Most vertebrates are either fearful of strange objects or indifferent to them. But newfangledness of most kinds doesn’t seem to faze a house sparrow. When Lynn Martin of the University of South Florida, Tampa, tested the sparrow’s tolerance for novel objects such as a rubber ball and a toy plastic lizard by placing them near seed-filled feeding cups, he discovered a surprise. The house sparrows were not only unperturbed by the strange objects, they actually seemed drawn to them—happier to approach the seed-filled dishes when ball or lizard was present. Martin noted that this was the first record of a novel object actually being attractive to a vertebrate (apart from man).
If you’re going to invade a new place, a love of novelty helps.
So does a fondness for hanging out in groups.
But later Daniel Sol explains in the case of Carib grackles:
“Bolder individuals tend to explore more quickly but more superficially, … the slower explorers gain better information and use this to act with more flexibility.”
