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fought fierce headwinds to cross the English Channel to deliver the first ...
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King Solomon and Cyrus the Great used pigeons to carry critical messages. The ancient Greeks learned to do so as well: a human runner took most of the day to bring news of the Persian defeat at Marathon to Athens, only twenty-six miles away, and then died of exhaustion. A pigeon could have made the trip in less than an hour.
Mongolian emperor Kublai Khan knew this and established a pigeon post that covered one-sixth of the globe.
a horse runs thirty-five miles an hour over a one-mile race. A pigeon can fly more than five hundred miles in one day at speeds over sixty miles per hour—and the bird performs the feat fueled by just an ounce of seed eaten the day before, and without stopping for a sip of water.
Pigeons would even beat the iron horse.
The telegraph service had gaps and the rail was too slow.
“If your pigeon is a real winner, he can be worth a great deal as a breeder,
How do you proclaim a winner when each loft is at a different distance from the starting line? The first bird to make it home isn’t necessarily the winner. The winning time is calculated in yards per minute. The Lesieurs’ J & J Loft is 182.4 air miles from the Ilion starting line, as determined by the Global Positioning System. When a bird lands on a rubber pad in front of the loft door, a scanner records the number of the band on the leg, like an item at the grocery store. The bird’s number, as well as the exact time of landing, is recorded on a special computerized clock. Divide the loft’s
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Only one person witnesses the release: the liberator,
When he turns the lever that opens all the cages at the release site, “they shoot out like water out of a hose,”
They usually circle as a group and start out flying as one big flock, even though many of the pigeons have never met before; t...
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To get home, they must fly east. “If they see the sun, they go toward that. But if they’re young birds, they could go ...
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mystery:
even when they are released from the same location, they don’t take the same route home each time.
in other studies, however: a ten-year study at Oxford University found that their pigeons did take the same routes.
birds in flight do bump into one another, but seldom with disastrous results.
Each bird in the flying flock, it appears, keeps track of the position of six or seven birds nearby. To do so, they watch, they listen, and they probably also pay attention to the feel of the air moving through the wings of their neighbors.
Pigeons are blessed with bits of magnetite in the upper part of the beak, which might serve them like a compass needle or help them to identify magnetic landmarks along a learned route. But birds have a second mechanism for gathering and judging information about the earth’s magnetic field as well. When light strikes the retina in the eye, it changes the conformation of its molecules. In birds, though, another change also occurs in
The study strongly suggests that birds can actually see the magnetic field of the earth.
magnetic sense can be disrupted; strong solar winds distort the field,
Sounds can be masked or warped; scents blocked or swept away. No one system always works. And so many things can go wrong.
Taiwan’s national passion for pigeons, I read, “borders on mania.”
Parrots
Less than 5 percent of mammals form any but short-term pair bonds, but fully 90 percent of all bird species during any breeding season are monogamous. Parrots take this to the extreme. In the wild, parrots mate for life, and because their lifespans rival those of humans, that can be a very long time.
In the wild, quite a number of birds—including mockingbirds, starlings, ravens, and Australian lyrebirds, totally unrelated to parrots—imitate the calls of other birds, frogs, and insects.
Ornithologists theorize that mimicry may have evolved initially to fool other birds or predators.
mockingbirds, mimicry allows a male to expand his song repertoire, a crucial advantage when females prefer the male with the most songs.
Thick-billed euphonias, tropical tanagers, use mimicry to enlist the help of other birds in protecting their nests. Imitating the mobbing calls of neighboring species enlists the neighbors’ help to scare away predators that threaten their eggs or young.
The conclusion to the paper: “This study shows that beat perception and synchronization is not a uniquely human phenomenon.”
People with neurological problems often benefit from music therapy more than they do from drugs.
Those afflicted with Parkinson’s disease, for instance, often become frozen in their movements; music can release them. Athletes often use music to coordinate their movements;
birdsong, like language, shows geographical variations or dialects.
FOXP2 gene,
But in both humans and songbirds, it is critical in the development of vocal communication.
Young birds learn songs much like young humans learn language. As children first learn sounds, then words, then sentences, young birds first learn simple notes, then a song of “syllables” that make up “motifs” and then whole singing bouts, organized into correct patterns and timing.
early babblings “subsong.” In transforming subsong to real song, individuals not only imitate parents and neighbors but also improvise and invent: young birds transform themes, mix syllables, and incorporate new elements into their songs and may create individual signatures.
Children do the exact s...
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Darwin proposed the idea that music was the immediate predecessor of language, arguing that the human voice was first employed to attract a mate.
issue is hotly debated, a sizable number of experts think that our closest human relatives, the extinct Neanderthals, lacked complex language—but sang instead.
these early people had a prelinguistic communication system more like music than speech. Only recently, says Mithen, have language and music, poetry, and dance separated into different ways of thinking.
Crows
massing of crows into gigantic, communal winter roosts.
Bravely risking (and sometimes losing) their lives, groups of crows mob day-flying predators like hawks, chasing away and cawing loudly;
long-lived,
live in close-knit, stable family groups,
around to help his parents raise the current
Crows have a sense of humor: Larry watched crows tweak the ears and tails of other animals for pure mischief, land on sleeping cows and sheep to startle them awake, and fly off with unattended car keys as well as clothing drying on clotheslines just to watch people run after them.
Crows are loyal. They’ll feed sick family members and will guard them until they get better; injured crows call to flock-mates, who rush to help and fend off predators.
s...
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Crows fall into a category of wildlife that biologists call “invigorated species.” While all too many populations of wild creatures are shrinking due to human activity, a few benefit. Crows, like raccoons, Canada geese, coyotes, and white-tailed deer, have not only adapted to but have taken advantage of some of the changes humans have made to the landscape—and
