Tim Birkhead > Quotes

“Touch’ is a multi-faceted concept, reflecting the different types of receptors. The simplest are free nerve endings which detect pain and changes in temperature; slightly more complex are Merkel’s tactile cells (which detect pressure); followed by Grandry bodies, which consist of two to four tactile cells and detect movement (velocity); and the lamellated Herbst corpuscles (similar to Vater-Pacinian corpuscles in mammals), which are sensitive to acceleration.”
― Tim Birkhead, Bird Sense: What It's Like to Be a Bird

“Magnetic sensations are different because, unlike light and sound, they can pass through body tissues. This means that it is possible for a bird (or other organism) to detect magnetic fields via chemical reactions inside individual cells throughout its entire body.”
― Tim Birkhead, Bird Sense: What It's Like to Be a Bird

“One of the most remarkable of all ornithological discoveries was the realisation that birds in temperate regions undergo enormous seasonal changes in their internal organs...Perhaps the most far-reaching discovery relating to these changes was the finding in the 1970s that parts of the brain also varied in size across the year...The centres in the avian brain that control the acquisition and delivery of song in male birds shrink at the end of the breeding season and grow again in the following year.”
― Tim Birkhead, Bird Sense: What It's Like to Be a Bird

“When I mentioned to a friend I was writing a book about eggs he told me to be sure to mention how in Thomas Hardy's "Jude the Obscure" the young Arabella incubates a sky-blue egg of a song bird in the cleavage of her bosom ... When I checked, I was disappointed to find it wasn't a song thrush egg, but that of a chicken ... The original image in my mind disintegrated like the sound of a vinyl record after the power has been turned off.”
― Tim Birkhead, The Most Perfect Thing: Inside and Outside a Bird's Egg

“Ingeniously, [Heinrich Wickmann] was able to use a pencil to mark that bit of the egg he could see inside the hen's oviduct, through its cloaca prior to laying. (I can just imagine his wife popping into his study with a cup of coffee and seeing Wickmann with his pencil up a hen's bottom: 'What are you doing, dear?' she asks...).”
― Tim Birkhead, The Most Perfect Thing: Inside and Outside a Bird's Egg

“THERE ARE CURRENTLY VERY CLOSE TO TEN thousand species of birds in the world, both beautiful and improbable, and they have contributed more to the study of zoology than almost any other group of animals (Konishi et al. 1989). The reasons are obvious: birds are diurnal, they are often easily observed and studied, and we like them.”
― Tim Birkhead, Ten Thousand Birds: Ornithology since Darwin

“In a similar vein, John Videler (2006) of Leiden University suggested the “Jesus Christ dinosaur” model of flight origins, whereby protobirds may have gained advantages for both escape and foraging by running over the surface of water rather than land.”
― Tim Birkhead, Ten Thousand Birds: Ornithology since Darwin

“Science is described as a search for… on the basis of the available scientifice evidence, we currently believe. Changing your mind in the light of new ideas or better evidence constitutes cientific progress. … on the basis of the current evidence this is what we believe to be true.”
― Tim Birkhead, Bird Sense: What It's Like to Be a Bird

“Nests – sometimes a metre or so across and containing multiple chambers – were often owned by two males operating as a team.”
― Tim Birkhead, Bird Sense: What It's Like to Be a Bird

“As drought kicks in, the choughs experience several things simultaneously. The shortage of food increases their stress levels; the birds are forced to spend more time searching for food, and less time keeping an eye open for predators. If food is really short the birds use up all their body fat and start to use the protein reserves in their breast muscles. This in turn impairs their ability to fly, so that if a predator such as a wedge-tailed eagle does attack they have less chance of escaping. Stress is increased further as birds squabble over food. Whereas group members might once have shared food, as hunger bites individuals become extremely selfish and try to keep food for themselves. Larger or more dominant birds simply push the smaller individuals aside and steal their food; resistance is useless, for the stress of losing a fight may be more damaging still.”
― Tim Birkhead, Bird Sense: What It's Like to Be a Bird

“Theunis Piersma and his colleagues in the 1990s showed how red knots were able to detect tiny immobile bivalves (like mussels and clams) hidden in sand. When the bird pushes its beak into wet sand it generates a pressure wave in the minute amounts of water lying between the sand grains. This pressure wave is disrupted by solid objects, such as bivalves, which block the flow of water, thereby creating a ‘pressure disturbance’ detectable by the bird.”
― Tim Birkhead, Bird Sense: What It's Like to Be a Bird

“Working on the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico, Beissinger’s study species was the wonderfully named pearly-eyed thrasher – a common thrush-like bird.”
― Tim Birkhead, The Most Perfect Thing: Inside (and Outside) a Bird’s Egg

“In a final flourish, drawing on his extensive knowledge of avian anatomy, he presents a critique of the supposed morphology of divine beings: “If angels had any reality, they would be very clumsy and awkward fliers with a slow heavy flight, lacking as they are in aerodynamic shape.”
― Tim Birkhead, Ten Thousand Birds: Ornithology since Darwin

“Striking evidence of the ability of birds to hear the fine details of song involves the so-called ‘sexy syllables’ in canary song.”
― Tim Birkhead, Bird Sense: What It's Like to Be a Bird

“Rapid and repeated probing, so typical of these wading birds, is thought to allow them to build up a composite three-dimensional image of food items hidden in the sand.24”
― Tim Birkhead, Bird Sense: What It's Like to Be a Bird

“Humans are, of course, typically right- or left-handed; we also tend to have a dominant eye – in about 75 per cent of people it is the right eye – although we are not usually aware of using our eyes differentially. Yet in those birds whose eyes are placed ‘laterally’, that is, on the side of the head, the two eyes are used for different tasks. Day-old chicks of the domestic fowl, for example, tend to use their right eye for close-up activities like feeding and the left eye for more distant activities such as scanning for predators.”
― Tim Birkhead, Bird Sense: What It's Like to Be a Bird

“It appears that it is the robin’s ability to see contours and edges in the landscape that provides the appropriate signal to trigger the magnetic sense. Extraordinary! As one of my colleagues said: ‘You couldn’t make this stuff up.”
― Tim Birkhead, Bird Sense: What It's Like to Be a Bird

“In 2008 Prum’s graduate student Jakob Vinther, with Prum and two of their Yale colleagues, identified melanosomes (tiny organelles that contain melanin) in fossil feathers from the Lower Cretaceous (100–65 MYA) of Brazil and the Early Eocene (56–49 MYA) of Denmark. They were thus able to show that those feathers were colored with black and white stripes. Indeed, they concluded that most fossil feathers are actually preserved in such a way that it might be possible to determine the colors of extinct birds and feathered dinosaurs.”
― Tim Birkhead, Ten Thousand Birds: Ornithology since Darwin