The Genius of Birds

by Jennifer Ackerman

Only with the peptides active in their brains, apparently, will the birds properly partner up. Some research suggests that oxytocin may play a similar role in humans.

In one study, psychologist Ruth Feldman of Bar-Ilan University in Israel found that levels of the hormone in humans are correlated with the longevity of relationships—couples with more oxytocin have longer-lasting relationships.

Indeed, some studies of human couples show the opposite of what you might expect: correlations between oxytocin and negative emotions such as anxiety and distrust.

A few decades ago, science considered birds the very models of sexual monogamy. In the Nora Ephron film Heartburn, the female lead bemoans her husband’s philandering, and her father responds, “You want monogamy? Marry a swan.” But thanks to years of field observations and the advent of molecular “fingerprinting,” we now know that swans aren’t sexually exclusive and neither are most other birds.

DNA analysis has revealed that extra-pair copulations occur in about 90 percent of bird species.

Pair-bonded birds may be socially monogamous, but they’re rarely sexually (or therefor...

Take the Eurasian skylark (Alauda arvensis), an Old World lark that lives in open grasslands, marshes, and heathlands across Europe and Asia and is noted for singing extraordinarily long and complex songs of up to seven hundred different syllables on the wing.

A new theory offered by two biologists from the University of Norway suggests that philandering females are encouraging better cooperation in the whole neighborhood. “Females benefit because extra-pair paternity incentivizes males to shift focus from a single brood towards the entire neighbourhood, as they are likely to have offspring there.”

In essence, by not putting all their eggs in one basket, so to speak, females are pumping up the public good, encouraging safer and more productive neighborhoods.

In other words, what’s good for the goose is good for all the local geese and ganders.

Regularly procuring extra-pair copulations while maintaining a social partnership makes for a complex social life—and, in West’s view, an intersexual cognitive arms race.

Indeed, in species with more extra-pair paternity, females have relatively larger brains than males; the reverse is true in species with less extra-pair paternity.

The result of all this philandering in birds while at the same time tending to long-term pair-bonds? A boost in brain size for both sexes.

THERE MAY BE ANOTHER social arms race goosing bird intelligence. This one involves the p...

Jays ...

True to its common name, the sau...

Azure like its blue jay cousins (though without the jaunty crest), it is equally impudent, known as a thief, scoundrel, and jackal of the bush.

According to one ornithologist, a favorite trick of the jay is to rob a cat of its food by giving its tail a vigorous peck and, “when the cat turns to retaliate, to jump for the prize and make off with shrieks of exultation.”

Haha, take that, asshole cat!

It all sounds very honorable and industrious, except for one thing. The birds live a kind of double life, storing their own food for future use while raiding the stores of other birds. They are cachers, all right, but they are also thieves who mine the hard-won booty of their neighbors.

Aaarrr matey! 🏴‍☠️

But here’s the really amazing thing. A scrub jay will think to do this—to resort to these clever cache-protection tactics—only if he’s had his own piratical experience. Birds that have never pilfered themselves hardly ever recache. In other words, say the researchers, “it takes a thief to know a thief.”

Again, “Aaarrr matey!” 🏴‍☠️

DO BIRDS EXPERIENCE SUCH prized human social or emotional capacities as empathy or grief? It’s a lingering question.

the greylag was made famous by Nobel laureate Konrad Lorenz, who demonstrated that the young birds imprint on anything that moves. Case in point: The goslings he raised by hand followed—and then later tried to mate with—his Wellington boots.

conflicts.The biggest boost in heart rate, it turned out, occurred not in response to something surprising or frightening, such as a clap of thunder or the roar of traffic, but in reaction to a social conflict involving either a partner or a family member. For the scientists, this points to emotional involvement, possibly even empathy.

One study revealed that after watching a partner in a conflict, rooks often comfort the distressed bird within a minute or two by twining bills with it.

an uninvolved bystander (third party) offered this tender reassurance to the victim of aggression in the conflict, usually a mate.

Only a few animal species have been known to reassure others in distress, among them great apes and dogs.

Sniff-sniff-sniff-sniff….

To their surprise, the researchers found that within two minutes following an intense fight, bystanding flock members offered consoling gestures to the victim of a conflict. The gestures, offered most often by a partner or an ally, included sitting side by side with the victim, preening it, bill twining, or touching its body gently with the bill while uttering soft, low “comfort” sounds.

use of the “f-word,” as one commentator put it. Some critics smelled straight-out anthropomorphism. This was hardly a funeral in the human sense. No, but the researchers weren’t suggesting that. They were just demonstrating how birds respond to a dead member of their own species: apparently, by noisily telling other birds about the death and perhaps alerting the group to danger, a behavior the scientists called “cacophonous aggregation.” In this sense, perhaps the scrub jay gathering was more like the Irish wake that naturalist Laura Erickson recalled when she heard about this research.

The jays respond only weakly or not at all to the deaths of smaller species, such as finches. This suggests that these gatherings are used in assessing risk rather than for mourning, says Iglesias. Similarly sized birds tend to share predators. “However,” she adds, “this does not preclude the possibility that western scrub jays experience emotional pain during some if not all cacophonous gatherings.”

Konrad Lorenz once noted that a greylag goose that had lost its partner showed symptoms of grief similar to that of young children who have suffered loss, “the eyes sink deep into their sockets . . . the individual has an overall drooping experience, literally letting the head hang.” The jury is still out on whether birds grieve their own. But more and more scientists seem willing to admit the possibility.

Gifts of the Crow, John Marzluff and Tony Angell suggest that crows and ravens “routinely” gather around their own dead.

If you happened to find yourself at the foot of the stairs in the White House on a typical afternoon sometime around 1804 or 1805, you might have noticed a perky bird in a pearl-gray coat ascending the steps behind Thomas Jefferson, hop by hop, as the president retired to his chambers for a siesta. This was Dick. Although the president didn’t dignify his pet mockingbird with one of the fancy Celtic or Gallic names he gave his horses and sheepdogs—Cucullin, Fingal, Bergère—still it was a favorite pet. “I sincerely congratulate you on the arrival of the Mocking bird,” Jefferson wrote to his son-in-law, who had informed him of the advent of the first resident mockingbird. “Learn all the children to venerate it as a superior being in the form of a bird.” Dick may well have been one of the two mockingbirds Jefferson bought in 1803. These were pricier than most pet birds ($10 or $15 then—around $125 now) because their serenades included not only renditions of all the birds of the local woods, but also popular American, Scottish, and French songs.

Alba Gu Brath! 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 🐦

But Jefferson adored Dick for his uncommon intelligence, his musicality, and his remarkable ability to mimic. As the president’s friend Margaret Bayard Smith wrote, “Whenever he was alone he opened the cage and let the bird fly about the room. After flitting for a while from one object to another, it would alight on his table and regale him with its sweetest notes, or perch on his shoulder and take its food from his lips.” When the president napped, Dick would sit on his couch and serenade him with both bird and human tunes.

The skill is the ability to imitate sounds, to glean acoustic information and use it for one’s own vocal production—a vital prerequisite for language. It’s called vocal learning, and it’s rare in the animal world, thus far found only in parrots, hummingbirds, songbirds, the bellbirds, a few marine mammals (such as dolphins and whales), bats, and one primate—humans.

Yet the World Book Encyclopaedia back in the late 1940s pooh-poohed any correlation between birds’ mimicry abilities and their intelligence. I wonder what they would say now?

song learning is clearly a cognitive task:

The scientists are noting the remarkable similarities of song learning in birds with human speech learning, from the process of imitating and practicing right down to the brain structures involved and the actions of specific genes—how songbirds have “speech defects” just as we do (they stutter, for instance) and the way song learning in a bird literally crystallizes brain structure,

“If we were looking for some kind of animal equivalent, wouldn’t we look to our closest relatives, the great apes?” he asks. “But the odd thing is, so many aspects of human speech acquisition are similar to the way that songbirds acquire their songs. In the great apes, there’s no equivalent at all.”

But from the heart of this shrub I catch the tea-kettle, tea-kettle, tea-kettle, tea-kettle of a Carolina wren

Mockingbirds have been maligned as mere thieves who pilfer tunes and miss the main musical point of their stolen songs. But to my ear, this Delaware bird sang Carolina wren the way Bette Midler does the Andrews Sisters. It may be true that he was a shameless sampler, strewing about phrases from titmouse, chickadee, the sweet liquid song of a wood thrush, but he tucked them into his song the way Shostakovich weaves his symphony around a simple folk melody.

Nice pop and classical music analogies there!

How can a bird store so many tunes in a brain a thousand times smaller than mine? And how did those tunes get there in the first place? Why is this bird apparently serenading himself deep inside a bush? “It’s not unlike our singing in the shower,” hints Lauren Riters of the University of Wisconsin,

But songbirds go through the same process of vocal learning that people do—they listen to adult exemplars, they experiment, and they practice, honing their skills

Some of our most complicated skills—language, speech, music—we learn the way birds do, through a similar process of imitation.

For sheer complexity, the calls of the black-capped chickadee far and away beat out a great tit’s two-tone song. But singing is something special.

These utterances are innate or imprinted, like a sheep’s baa. “Vocal learning, on the other hand, involves the ability to hear a sound and then, by using muscles of your larynx or syrinx, to actually repeat that sound yourself,” explains Jarvis, “whether it be a sound learned in speech or the note of a birdsong.”

Close to half the birds on the planet are songbirds, some four thousand species,

Birds know where to sing and when. In the open, sound travels best a few feet or so above the vegetation, so birds sing from perches to reduce interference. Those singing on the forest floor use tonal sounds and lower frequencies than those singing in the canopy. Some use frequencies that avoid the noise from insects and traffic. Birds living near airports sing their dawn chorus earlier than normal to reduce overlap with the roar of airplanes.

Because of a single invention. It’s a unique instrument called a syrinx, after the nymph transformed into a reed by Pan, god of fields, flocks, and fertility. Scientists took a long time figuring out its details because the syrinx is buried deep in a bird’s chest, where the trachea splits in two to send air to the bronchi.

The high-tech image revealed a remarkable structure. It’s made of delicate cartilage and two membranes that vibrate with airflow at superfast speeds—one on each side of the syrinx—to create two independent sources of sound.

Certain songbirds, such as European starlings and zebra finches, can contract and relax these tiny vocal muscles with submillisecond precision—more than a hundred times faster than the blink of a human eye. This feat of fast-muscle contraction has shown up in only a handful of animals, including the sound-producing organ of rattlesnakes.

His phantasmagorical song may be executed by his syrinx, but it’s initiated and coordinated by his brain.