COMPARE ALL THIS WITH the ruddy turnstone, a small wading bird near the bottom of the innovative-behavior totem pole. In his book The Wind Birds, Peter Matthiessen describes an early experiment on the shorebird’s behavior by eighteenth-century English naturalist Mark Catesby: “Catesby provided a ruddy turnstone with stones to turn, the better to observe the feeding trait that gives the bird its name. In a time when scientific experiments were less complex than they are today, the bird was furnished systematically with stones that had nothing beneath them, whereupon ‘not finding under them the
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