The Genius of Birds
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Read between November 12 - November 15, 2018
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Extravagance in nature is so often found in proximity to sex.
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Others, such as canaries, are turned on by “sexy” syllables. This is a real term in the field. A syllable is sexy when a male bird uses his syrinx to sing with two different voices at once. In a sense, it’s like he’s singing a duet with himself. Female canaries much prefer these sexy two-voice syllables to single-voice syllables.
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Compare the two spectrograms side by side and the results are clear: No matter how hard the diligent student tries, his replications of his own syllables are wildly variable. The zebra finch’s are nearly identical. In terms of his precision, says Mooney, “the bird is like a perfect machine.” It’s what’s known as vocal consistency, the ability to perfectly replicate the acoustic features of a song—the notes, the rhythms, the pauses—from one rendition to the next. To a bird, these subtleties make all the difference.
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Because birdsong is such intricate and demanding behavior, it may be a handy and sensitive barometer not only of a suitor’s overall health but also of his brainpower.
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In this sense, then, the female sculpts in a male a neural song network of miraculous complexity and a brain that rewards him for the precision of his own song. It’s known as the mating-mind hypothesis: Cognition for complex male displays and cognition for female evaluation of those displays evolve together, affecting the brain structure in both sexes.
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That bird, unlike the cooperative long-tailed tit, leaves nest building entirely to his mate. No, this strange and elaborate creation, known as a bower, is built for one purpose only—seduction—by a creature of extraordinary craft and intelligence, the satin bowerbird (Ptilonorhynchus violaceus). So remarkable is the bowerbird family that the ornithologist E. Thomas Gilliard once remarked that birds should be split into two groups: bowerbirds and all other birds.
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In nature blue is unusual in part because vertebrates never evolved the ability to make or use blue pigments. The deep electric blue an eastern bluebird carries on its back is an example of what scientists call a structural color: It’s generated by light interacting with the three-dimensional arrangement of keratin in the bird’s feathers.
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John Endler suggests that visual art can be defined as “the creation of an external visual pattern by one individual in order to influence the behavior of others, and . . . artistic skill is the ability to create art.”
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Females are drawn in by displays of song and dance that are vigorous and intense, but not excessively so. Immoderate wing flipping and buzzing can look a lot like an aggressive display of one male toward another, which is a powerful turnoff for a female. So males are in a bit of a bind, says Patricelli: They need to display intensely to be attractive, but not go over the top, or they may drive females away. Courtship calls for more sensitivity than swagger, more tango, less kickboxing.
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The Arctic tern, a bird who lives by his love of long daylight and bent for high mileage, circles the world in orbit with the seasons, flying from its nesting grounds in Greenland and Iceland to its wintering grounds off the coast of Antarctica—a round-trip of almost forty-four thousand miles. In an average thirty-year lifetime, then, a tern may fly the equivalent of three trips to the moon and back.
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Why would the common pigeon shy away from high arboreal perches and favor narrow ledges? Because it descends, like all domestic pigeons, from the wild rock dove, a bird that nests in the sea cliffs and rocky islands of the Mediterranean. Rock doves forage for seeds in nearby fields and then return home with food for their squabs. It was in this context that the doves’ natural ability to navigate homeward probably evolved.
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At its peak in World War II, the U.S. Pigeon Service possessed fifty-four thousand birds.
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"possessed"
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Officials in Cuba still use the birds to transmit election results from remote mountainous areas, and the Chinese have lately built a force of ten thousand messenger pigeons to deliver military communications between troops stationed along their borders, in case of “electromagnetic interference or a collapse in our signals,” as the officer in charge of the pigeon army explains.
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One model holds that birds “see” magnetic fields with special molecules in the retina activated by certain wavelengths of light. Magnetic signals seem to affect the chemical reactions of these molecules, either speeding them up or slowing them down, depending on the direction of the magnetic field. In response, the retinal nerves fire signals to the visual areas of a bird’s brain, making it aware of the field’s direction. It all occurs at the subatomic level, involving the spinning of electrons, which suggests something extraordinary: Birds may be capable of sensing quantum effects. The ...more
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All of this section is super fascinating.
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Hummingbirds lead very energetically expensive lives. Not only does their rapid wing beat of up to seventy-five times a second suck up calories; so do their high-speed chases of rivals and their diving, waggling, zigzagging shuttle flights to attract mates. To fuel their air derbies, they have to harvest hundreds of flowers per day; they don’t want to waste a dime visiting blossoms they’ve already sucked dry. So they keep track. And they do it, apparently, not on the basis of color or shape or other visual tips offered by the flowers themselves, but rather through spatial cues, as food-storing ...more
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(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.)
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(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.)
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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.
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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.
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Is there something special in the cognitive toolkits of house sparrows and their like—pigeons, turtledoves, and other so-called synanthropes drawn to settle near humans—a set of mental skills that allows them to thrive in a place no matter how altered or degraded it may be?
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THE ORNITHOLOGIST PETE DUNN calls Passer domesticus the “Sidewalk Sparrow.” Before 1850, there were no house sparrows in North America. Today there are millions. You have to hand it to them. The first sixteen birds said to have been introduced to Brooklyn in 1851 to control a plague of moths may not have taken immediately to the New World, but another bigger shipment imported from England the following year did, and in a big way.
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Big brains are costly in terms of development and maintenance. But they’re thought to enhance a bird’s survival by allowing it to rapidly adjust to unusual, novel, or complex ecological challenges such as finding new food or avoiding unfamiliar predators. It’s called the cognitive buffer hypothesis. A big brain “buffers” an animal from environmental change by allowing it to adapt to novel resources—to try new foods and explore new objects and situations that a more “programmed” species might avoid.
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In his tally of inventive bird behaviors, Louis Lefebvre studied 808 species. Many birds had only one innovation to their name. The house sparrow had forty-four.
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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.
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It’s called the behavioral drive theory. The idea is this: Individual birds that adopt a new habit expose themselves to a new set of selection pressures. These new pressures may favor certain genetic variations or mutations that improve a bird’s effectiveness at living in a new way or within a new context. Birds with these variations diverge from the rest of the population. In other words, novel behaviors foster novel traits, which produce new species.
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Many migratory birds also depend on precisely timed stopovers for feeding at critical points along their routes. Take the red knot, a bird of modest brain but prodigious travel. Each spring, it journeys ninety-three hundred miles from Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic. For thousands of years the red knot has relied for sustenance on a precisely timed rendezvous with horseshoe crabs laying their eggs on the beaches of the Delaware Bay.
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Even the canny and adaptable house sparrow has its limits. 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.
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I highlighted this too. Except more . . . the part about the sparrow being (indicating as) the new canary in a coal mine (Earth).
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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. Watching the gobblers steal away through the long grass, this is easy to believe.
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