The Genius of Birds

by Jennifer Ackerman

(I was interested to learn that roughly a third of the world’s languages describe the space occupied by one’s body not in terms of right and left but with cardinal directions. Those who speak such languages are more skilled at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar places.)

But without a map or GPS on hand, most modern humans are hopeless at navigating.

Ain’t that the freakin’ truth!

(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.)

exposed them to a strong magnetic pulse, temporarily disrupting their magnetic sense.

Like a mini-EMP strike, eh?

Kaliningrad, Russia,

How timely.

It was April 2014, and researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, were testing whether a population of tiny golden-winged warblers breeding in the Cumberland Mountains of eastern Tennessee could carry geolocators on their backs. The birds had arrived only in the past day or two after a 3,000-mile journey north from their wintering grounds in Colombia. The team had just attached the gizmos to the tiny warblers when all the birds suddenly flew the coop, spontaneously evacuating their nesting grounds. The scientists later learned that a huge “supercell” spring storm was headed their way, one that would spawn eighty-four tornadoes and kill thirty-five people. The warblers left twenty-four hours before the devastating storm hit and flew in all directions, some as far south as Cuba. After the storm passed, they flew straight back to their nesting site—for some, a round-trip of almost 1,000 miles. The scientists conducting the study suggest that the birds may have been warned by the deep rumble of the superstorm when it was still 250 to 500 miles away, picking up on the strong low-frequency infrasounds generated by such tornadic storms. These can travel for hundreds to thousands of miles but are inaudible to humans.

A bit like mammals’ ability to detect pending earthquakes several hours before the quakes actually hit.

Sure enough, there was a big one that day: Just as the racing pigeons were heading out across the English Channel, their flight route crossed paths with a Concorde SST just leaving Paris.

The Concorde, gone but not forgotten!!

But for a long time, scientists thought birds couldn’t smell much. They didn’t display any of the more obvious nose-inspired behaviors—sniffing butts or snuffling truffles. Birds were more like us, it seemed, eye-minded creatures with highly evolved and sophisticated visual systems. “An extraordinary development of one set of organs is never accomplished but at the expense of some other set,” wrote one ornithologist in 1892. “In this case the organs of the sense of smell have been the martyrs.” That view has radically changed. The shift began in the 1960s with experiments revealing that pigeons exposed to a stream of scented air showed a spike in heart rate.

Imagine an aromatic rendition of the Statue of Liberty or the Tower of London.

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent . . . It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” These words are often attributed to Charles Darwin (and, to the embarrassment of the California Academy of Sciences, once etched as such into its stone floor), but they’re actually from the pen of the late Leon Megginson, a professor of marketing at Louisiana State University.

LSU, whoda thunkit.

Climate change

Aw jeez, here we go, now the book’s gotta wax political.

Before 1850, there were no house sparrows in North America.

Now the humble house sparrow is the world’s most widely distributed wild bird, with a global breeding population of some 540 million. It’s found on every continent except Antarctica

Successful amphibian and reptile colonists also have bigger brains than their less successful peers,

In some cities, you can find smoked cigarette butts in sparrow nests, which effectively function as a parasite repellent. Butts from smoked cigarettes retain large amounts of nicotine and other toxic substances, including traces of pesticides that repel all kinds of harmful creepy crawlies—an apparently ingenious new use of materials.

individuals may seem obvious to pet owners. But for a long time, variation among members of a single bird species was considered mere noise.

the untested realm of elasmobranchs.

i.e. stingrays.

the great tinamou,

Is that how Robert Ludlum got the term for “The Holcroft Covenant?”

We don’t even know what we’re losing. Scientists are still turning up new species: two kinds of hawk-owls in the Philippines in 2012, one thought to be extinct because of widespread deforestation on the island of Cebu; and in 2014, the Sulawesi streaked flycatcher, a diminutive bird with a mottled throat and melodious song, hanging on in patches of tall forest left by farmers; and in 2015, the secretive little Sichuan bush warbler living in the dense brush and tea plantations of central China’s mountainous provinces.

A new study suggests that crows exhibit an ability to grasp analogies—the sort of sophisticated understanding once thought solely the domain of humans and other primates.

Intelligence as we understand it may vary among birds, but no bird is truly stupid.

like the small dinosaurs they are,

genetically speaking, the turkey is closer to its dinosaur ancestors than any other bird is;

IN ANY CASE, we may think of intelligence as universally advantageous, but it isn’t always.

Sad but true! Look how many geniuses in history have been societal outcasts! Or people with book smarts but no common sense or people skills (IQ vs. EQ)!