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

by Jennifer Ackerman

The swoopers are almost always male. And only certain males are hyperaggressive in this way, says Jones—around 10 percent. “If it were higher than that, I don’t think Australia would be habitable.

The magpies live on average for twenty years and can remember up to thirty human faces for about that long, says Jones, “so if you anger a magpie once, you’re going to get attacked again and again.”

Birds also foster the young of other species.

“The honey-hunters use these special calls to signal honeyguides they’re eager to follow, and honeyguides use this information to choose partners who are likely to be good collaborators,”

When nestlings are “cross-fostered,” put in the nests of other species, most species imprint on the foster parent and learn its behaviors, songs, even mate choice decisions.

So you have to have excellent egg mimicry on the part of the cuckoo and excellent egg recognition on the part of the host.”

When she looked more closely at birds that build these dome nests, primarily fairy-wrens and thornbills, she found to her amazement that although they couldn’t reject cuckoo eggs, they had a very fine ability to recognize cuckoo chicks—and reject them. The little host birds would either seize the intruding chick and drag it out of the nest or abandon the nest altogether to start a new breeding attempt.

In any case, the fairy-wren parents use the absence of the password in a cuckoo chick’s begging call to single it out as an imposter.

In Feeney’s view, brood parasites may be driving convergence in an alarm call that effectively screams cuckoo in any bird language.

Now we know that 9 percent of bird species breed cooperatively and share parental care,

Most cooperative breeders are “facultative,” meaning they can breed successfully without helpers. Relatively few, like the ani, are “obligate”—they require helpers at the nest in order to successfully fledge young.

The researchers found that birds living in larger groups were better at solving cognitive puzzles than those living in smaller groups.

Even a single species may diverge in its way of breeding. Among Australian magpies, the western population breeds cooperatively; in the east, the birds breed in pairs.

It’s what I love about birds. They’re as inconsistent and unpredictable, as varied, as any group of animals on earth.

Birds live and act on a spectrum, just as we do, and they prove the power of exceptions, both in defining rules and in breaking them.

We understand now that birds are not just biologically distinct but culturally distinct—and that this is true even within a species.

one in four birds in the US and Canada have disappeared since 1970—nearly three billion birds.

“We dig up dinosaurs to try to figure out what happened to them. Perhaps someday dinosaurs in the form of corvids will dig us up to figure out what happened to us.”