The Bird Way: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think

by Jennifer Ackerman

As biologist E. O. Wilson once said, when you have seen one bird, you have not seen them all.

Bar-tailed godwits migrate from Alaska to New Zealand in a single 7,000-mile flight, traveling day and night for seven to nine days—the longest recorded nonstop migratory flight.

Flapping flight consumes ten to fifteen times more oxygen than resting.

“So these species are really the exceptions that prove the rule because they demonstrate that the competitive sex is the one most likely to have bright colors,”

Birds certainly recognize one another as individuals.

“If one wishes to understand the behavior of animals,” writes zoologist Donald Griffin “one must take account of their individuality, annoying as this may be to those who prefer the tidiness of physics, chemistry, and mathematical formulations.

We’ve learned not to ignore the outliers. They often have something important to tell us about what it takes to succeed as a bird, especially under difficult circumstances.

Australian birds occupy more ecological niches than birds anywhere on earth. They tend to be longer lived and more intelligent than birds on other continents. Also, Australia is where some fundamental aspects of bird being were born. Like song.

Birds in temperate regions, it turns out, are often the exceptions rather than the rule.

Tiny backpacks loaded with special devices attached to the heads of frigate birds, for instance, revealed some surprising sleep patterns. The birds doze while in flight, usually one brain hemisphere at a time, but they also fall into whole-brain sleep—just for a few seconds at a time—a quick in-flight power nap.

The world of birds moves about ten times faster than ours, and only with high-speed video can we see some of their amazing feats:

They speak with their voices, their bodies, and their feathers.

The vocalizations of most songbird species differ from place to place, forming local “dialects” just like human accents, distinct and long-lasting regional and cultural differences in the structure and composition of songs.

When zebra finch parents are breeding in a hot climate, and the nest hits a temperature above 80 degrees Fahrenheit, they’ll chirp the news to their unborn chicks in the last third of the incubation period—the moment when the embryos are developing their temperature-regulation system. In response to these “hot calls,” the chicks will actually curtail their growth and emerge smaller—an adaptive advantage in the heat.

The jays have evolved a sophisticated system of three different alarm calls specifying the hunting phase of the hawk—whether it’s perched, searching for prey, or attacking.

“The acoustic structure of the first note may tell the birds whether or not to flee, and the number of elements in the call as a whole may tell them for how long they should stay in hiding.”

Learning, rather than familiar acoustic structure, determines a bird’s response. “Birds learn who to pay attention to,” says Magrath. “And this happens at an astonishingly fine spatial scale.”

science is finding more and more parallels between speech and bird vocalizations, as well as language-like qualities in bird songs and calls.

the little brown thornbill, which weighs just six or seven grams, can imitate the song of birds more than ten times its size.”

Andrew Skeoch recorded one Australian magpie neighing exactly like a horse.

In this way, the male lyrebird uses his gifts of mimicry for vocal deception, misleading his mate, manipulating her biological response—lying to her—so she’ll crouch in terror while he finishes his business.

In fact, birds of all stripes use their sense of smell to navigate, locate burrows and nests, detect chemical signals during courtship, pick mates, avoid predators, and search out food.

A sensitivity to DMS also explains why seabirds consume plastics and other trash. Plastic debris emits the chemical scent, making trash smell like food and creating a kind of olfactory booby trap for seabirds.

To a seabird, the ocean is nothing like the featureless expanse of water we see. It’s an elaborate landscape of eddying odor plumes that reflect the oceanographic features and physical processes where phytoplankton predictably amass.

But witnesses have observed these birds doing something radically different: flying into active fires, picking up smoldering sticks, and then dropping them in unburned brush or grass, spreading the flames to new areas, presumably to flush out prey.

In other words, bivouac-checking birds may be sharing information, acting as heralds of rich food sources for other birds.

Scrub jays manage to recall not only where they buried their food, but also what they buried in a particular spot and when they buried it there so that they can retrieve first those foods that are quick to spoil, like fresh fruit, insects and worms, and save for later those that are more enduring, like nuts and seeds.

In both tests, ravens showed abilities of self-control, reasoning, and flexible planning for the future equal to a great ape’s.

In fact, play is most often defined by what it is not: It is behavior that is not purposeful, serves no obvious adaptive function, does nothing to enhance an animal’s chance of survival and reproduction—nothing apparent, at least.

“Animals quickly understand when another animal is playing,” says Osvath, even if it’s a different species. You can see it in humans, apes, dogs, cats, birds. There must be a conserved sign, a characteristic behavior, that all—or at least most—vertebrates understand.”

“It’s the play mood that seemed to be contagious,” says Osvath.

That play—and especially complex play—is spotty among animals suggests that it evolved independently multiple times and may be important in some way.

This difference—the ravens being drawn to what they know, and the kea, to what they don’t know, to new and novel things—makes a huge difference in how they behave and actually means that we must be very careful in designing our experiments and interpreting behaviors.

Two adult kea just hanging around on a stone wall, minding their own business in the misty drizzle. The recording of the warbling play call is heard in the background, and suddenly the birds look at each other, burst into squeals, and launch into play, becoming exceedingly silly, chasing each other, flapping up and down, picking up rocks and flinging them, playing hard for the full five minutes of the recording.

Play the kea play call to a group of people who have never heard a kea in their life, and they’ll laugh and say, “Oh, that sounds happy!” Play it to kea, and they’ll throw things, chase each other, or if no other birds are around, start playing by themselves.

The babbler’s concealing of sex, then, may be another example—like play in kea or facial signaling in red-billed queleas—of the skillful ability of birds to balance and negotiate social relationships to keep the peace and maintain cooperation. Perhaps not far off from its purpose in humans.

The truth is, plenty of birds interact sexually with dead members of their own species.

The team discovered that the cockatoos produce a regular rhythmic beat, like the beat setters of Western rock bands. And not all birds thump with the same rhythm. Individual males have their own distinctive signature cadences and percussive styles.

The engine of nature’s diverse and exuberant sexual displays, Darwin argued, is female preference.

We humans are constrained not just by our limited senses but also by our perception of time. In the bird world, things happen fast, sometimes too fast for us to see.

In other words, male broad-tailed hummingbirds dive, flash, and buzz not to show off their genetic quality, but because females like what they see.

When you look at an elaborate trait, says Zuk, whether it’s a peacock’s tail or a difficult diving display, and ask, “What’s going on with that?” you are really asking several questions. How did the trait get there? Why that trait and not some other? And how is it maintained in a population?

But the bowerbird does the worm one better. He arranges his objects to create an ingenious forced-perspective illusion, which is thought to make both himself and his colorful objects look bigger to the female when she watches from the bower.

In this way, bower design and display style may actually be culturally transmitted, like the song dialects of birds and human arts and customs.

It is now well known that sexual monogamy in the bird world—once considered the predominant way of mating—is largely a myth.

exclusive monogamy in a bird pair is actually considered noteworthy. Among the handful of true monogamists are mute swans, black vultures, scarlet macaws, bald eagles, Laysan’s albatrosses, whooping cranes, California condors, and Atlantic puffins.

In the past decade or so, Cockburn and his colleagues have discovered that female fairy-wrens pretty much run the cuckoldry show, foraying out for philandering before the bakeries open.

Instead, three factors are strongly correlated with the shape of eggs: an adult bird’s body mass, its evolutionary history, and, intriguingly, the ratio of a bird’s wing length to its width—a proxy for flight ability.

Birds that build elaborate nests learn and become better nest builders over time.

When hawks are present, jays forage higher up to avoid attack, creating a cone-shaped “enemy-free” nesting space beneath a hawk nest, where hummingbirds can raise their young in peace.