The Genius of Birds

by Jennifer Ackerman

As ornithologist Donald Kroodsma explains it, in listening to a male’s song and evaluating it, the female “designs” him so that his singing tells her whether he is worthy to be the father of her offspring:

Why is it always about worth? We assume selfish genes, essentially, in lieu of a more complex explanation involving, perhaps, emotions and aesthetics.

Riters observed male starlings singing in fall and spring, captured them, and then dipped their feet in hot water.

As Darwin wrote, “the songs of birds serve mainly as an attraction during the season of love,” but after the season for courtship is over, “male birds . . . continue singing for their own amusement.” Or possibly for the drugs.

Perhaps she picks so carefully so that her offspring will inherit quality traits such as good health, a strong immune system, vigor, and intelligence. It’s called the good genes model. That’s one idea.

There’s another, more radical idea. Female bowerbirds and peacocks and other choosy female birds may be drawn to gorgeous bowers and displays because—well—because they’re gorgeous.

This was Charles Darwin’s really dangerous idea, says Richard Prum: that colorful feathers or beautiful bowers can do two things at once. They can advertise desirable qualities like vigor and health. But they can also “just be desirable qualities in and of ...

As Prum points out, Darwin’s idea that female animals might appreciate beauty for its own sake was also daring for this reason. Males may gradually evolve beautiful traits, Darwin proposed—whether splendid feathers or song or bower—“through the preference of the females during many generations.” Male peacock feathers, for instance, coevolved with the aesthetic sense of the female, who appreciates the glorious colors and patterns.

Birds have possibly the most advanced visual system of any vertebrate, with a highly developed ability to distinguish colors over a wide range of wavelengths. We have three kinds of cone cells for color vision in our retinas; birds have four. Some species of birds are sensitive to the ultraviolet end of the spectrum, where we’re blind. Moreover, in each of a bird’s cone cells is a drop of colored oil that enhances its ability to detect differences between similar colors.

Still, some of the cues birds use to make visual judgments may be rooted in universal principles of beauty—or at least attractiveness—such as symmetry, pattern, and contrasting colors. Experiments in the 1950s, for instance, showed that crows and jackdaws have a distinct preference for regular, symmetrical patterns.

The ability was once thought to be innate in birds, a matter of instinct. Now we know that bird navigation involves sensing, learning, and, above all, a remarkable ability to build a map in the mind, one far bigger than we ever imagined and made of strange and still mysterious cartography.

THE DOMESTIC PIGEON, Columba livia, is a good bird for probing such questions. Pigeons have a bad rap as gutter birds, rats with wings, pecking savagely at bread crumbs beneath park benches or rummaging in our city dumps. They’re considered by some to be as dumb as a dodo (a close relative, in fact).

O’Keefe and psychologist Lynn Nadel observed that certain special cells in the hippocampus fired only when the rats were in a specific place. As a rat meandered through a maze, these “place cells” fired in a spatial pattern that precisely matched the rodent’s zigzagging path.

our recollections appear to be all bound up with where we experienced an event. New research shows that when we recall an event, the place cells in our hippocampus that store the location of that event fire again, helping us to locate a memory in both space and time. This explains why retracing your steps can help you remember what you were looking for. Your memory of a thought is married to the place in which it first occurred to you.

A brown pelican found dead on the Baja coast tried the same trick but without success. The bird had the tail spine of a stingray embedded in its throat and had died, presumably, as a result of choking or poisoning. “Proof that opportunism is a hazardous way of life,” noted the observers.

Keas, those clever, playful parrots endemic to New Zealand, will consume almost anything. They eat a hundred species of plants, insects, eggs, seabird chicks, and animal carcasses—which may be one reason they survived the mass extinctions wrought by human settlement on the island.

farmers, who placed a bounty on the birds, resulting in the deaths of an estimated 150,000 keas. The birds’ investigative tendencies in ski fields, parking lots, and rubbish dumps often endanger the remaining 1,000 to 5,000 individuals. One kea in the alpine village of Mount Cook ran into trouble on account of his skill at opening the lids of trash cans. He was found dead with 20 grams of dark liquid material in his crop. The cause of death? “Methylxanthine toxicity after opportunistic ingestion of dark chocolate.”

But, as Lynn Martin suggests, “Eating new (possibly nasty) stuff increases the risks, including the risk of infection.”

ability to brood several times in a single breeding season. (The latter, called a bet-hedging strategy, reduces the fitness costs of failed breeding attempts, which, as Daniel Sol says, “appears to be particularly useful in urban environments, where the risk of reproductive failure may be high.”)

Quail, around Pullman wa

This may go a long way toward explaining why there are close to 120 species of corvids and only a handful of ratites, flightless birds like the ostrich and the emu. It also begs the question of whether we humans, in creating novel and unstable environments, are changing the very nature of the bird family tree.

On Mount Karimui, an extinct volcano on the main island, the range of the magnificent bird-of-paradise had ascended more than three hundred feet as a result of warming of just 0.7 degree Fahrenheit. “Because a mountain is like a pyramid,” says Freeman, “there’s less area for habitat available as they move up the mountain. They’re being squeezed both by temperatures and for space.” The white-winged robin, for instance, which lived on the top one thousand feet of a mountain fifty years ago, now wedges into just the top four hundred feet.

once saw a global map of human impact showing that only around 15 percent of the world’s land area has escaped the human footprint.

In Ben Freeman’s home city, Seattle, the 2014 Christmas Bird Count totaled just 225 house sparrows within the city limits. “That’s the lowest total ever,” says Freeman, “and one piece of evidence that house sparrows may be declining.” Indeed, around the globe the bird is experiencing rapid and massive declines—in North America, Australia, and India, but especially in some towns and cities across Europe. Its decline generates few headlines, but the sparrow is now listed as a species of conservation concern in Europe; in Great Britain, it’s red listed. In the past half century, the United Kingdom has lost an average of fifty house sparrows every hour. No one is certain why.

collisions with cars

the growing numbers of domestic cats and city-loving raptors.

climate c...

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. The experiment involved a pattern-matching game.

This is a truly amazing demonstration of humanlike mental powers. But shouldn’t we also appreciate the complex cognitive abilities of birds in their own right and not because they look like some aspects of our own?

A new study comparing the genomes of birds suggests that, genetically speaking, the turkey is closer to its dinosaur ancestors than any other bird is; its chromosomes have undergone fewer changes than other birds since the days of feathered dinosaurs.