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

by Jennifer Ackerman

There is the mammal way and there is the bird way.” This is one scientist’s pithy distinction between mammal brains and bird brains: two ways to make a highly intelligent mind.

But the bird way is much more than a unique pattern of brain wiring. It’s flight and egg and feathers and song.

Diversity fascinates biologists. It fascinates birdwatchers, too, driving us to assemble life lists, to travel to far corners of the globe to visit a rare species or jump in the car to spot a vagrant blown in by a storm, to go “pishing” and whistling into the woods to draw that elusive warbler.

Perhaps most unsettling, warring choughs do something few animals apart from humans and ants do: They forcibly kidnap and enslave the young from other groups.

This is a book about the range of surprising and sometimes alarming behaviors that birds perform daily, activities that firmly, sometimes gleefully, reverse conventional notions about what is “normal” in birds and what we thought they were capable of.

Earth is home to well over ten thousand different species of birds,

“Birds can’t use their color as a weapon, but they can use it to avoid conflict,” he says.

Birds display plenty of behaviors at the more altruistic end of the spectrum—helping, cooperating, collaborating, acting selflessly.

Only lately has science illuminated how birds can be smart with a brain at best the size of a walnut. In 2016, a team of international scientists reported their discovery of one secret: birds pack more brain cells into a smaller space.

bird brains have the potential to provide much higher cognitive clout per pound than do mammalian brains.

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: tap dancing to a beat, turning somersaults in the air, executing display moves as complex, coordinated, and beautiful as those of any gymnast.

all our beloved songbirds of the Northern Hemisphere trace their origins to ancestors living in Australasia and New Guinea forty-five million to sixty-five million years ago.

As Tim Low will tell you, Australia is where birdsong began. DNA analysis has revealed that songbirds, as well as parrots and pigeons, evolved on the continent and radiated outward, spreading around the globe in successive waves.

The birds that carol the dawn chorus at my home halfway around the world in central Virginia—American robins, mockingbirds, warblers, sparrows, cardinals, finches—all descend from the early passerines of Australia, and like Pilliga’s birds, they all talk at once.

Birds cry like children, grunt like pigs, meow like cats, and sing like divas. They speak in dialects and carol in pairs and choruses. They glean all sorts of information from calls and songs—a singer’s species identity, its geographic origin, group membership, even its individual identity. And they use sound in ingenious ways—to share information, negotiate boundaries, and influence one another’s behavior.

There may be other ways in which a bird’s use of call and song mirrors our own use of language and reveals intelligence—for instance, in its powerful capacity to deceive and manipulate. As one psychologist said, “The truth comes naturally, but lying takes effort and a sharp, flexible mind.”

you knew when the place was active by the volt of vultures across the road hunching awkwardly on the rooftops, sunken heads rounding into curved shoulders. Today they still jostle for space near the site, like a Supreme Court made of Richard Nixons.

Humans have three types of color-receptive cones in our retinas, blue, green, and red. Birds have a fourth color cone that is sensitive to ultraviolet wavelengths.

With their extra UV cone, birds can distinguish shades of color we can’t tell apart, allowing them to spot prey well camouflaged against the uniform background of a grassy field or leafy forest floor, and to detect things invisible to us—like

Birds see a massive spectrum of color our brains are simply incapable of processing. “It’s not just that they can see wavelengths of colors in a part of the spectrum we can’t see,” says Mary Caswell Stoddard, an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University, who studies avian color vision. “It’s that ultraviolet light is a fundamental pa...

it’s not simply human vision plus some purplish UV colors. It’s a complete reimagining...

As it turns out, vultures don’t relish putrefied meat; they prefer a fresh kill.

turkey vultures have knowing noses, and used the birds to locate leaks in natural gas lines. The engineers had figured out that if they introduced ethyl mercaptan into the line, they could locate leaks by the concentrations of turkey vultures circling above the line or sitting on the ground next to it. The same sulfurous chemical added to natural gas so the human nose can detect a leak, it turns out, is also released by an animal shortly after it dies.

How remarkable: Birds create an actual living compass for food finding.

The reward system is central to everything an animal does, says Osvath. It’s why we eat and why we have sex. It’s why some of us watch birds and why some of us study them. “A lot of us do things for no particular purpose,” says Osvath, “science, culture, writing books—we do these things mainly because we like to do them. It’s very much associated with our exploratory or play behavior. It’s completely useless to study birds or go to the moon or investigate

any field that does not have practical applications. It’s getting basic knowledge, and that’s very interesting to us and we learn a lot from it, but it’s actually just play.”

Ravens and kea are considered the two most playful birds on the planet, but they couldn’t be more different in their demeanor.

— Levick had no context for the penguins’ behavior. The truth is, plenty of birds interact sexually with dead members of their own species.

Beware entering the range of a magpie with chicks. Most Australians have learned this the hard way. Some 85 percent have been attacked at some point in their lives, says Darryl Jones, a professor of behavioral ecology at Griffith University in Brisbane, known as the “Magpie Guy.”

In greater Brisbane alone, 800 to 1,200 attacks are documented each year—and those are just the ones that are reported. I was there in late August and early September of 2017, just as the nesting season began, and the stories I heard were chilling.

Living in a complex social world can have a powerful effect on cognition in a bird. Scientists have found that social living in animals actually changes the brain, enhancing the neural mechanisms underlying cognition—the synthesis and release of neuromodulators, the formation and strengthening of synapses between neurons, the birth of new neurons.

Group living demands a lot of cognitive skills, including learning, memory, perhaps even the ability to take another bird’s perspective.

cooperative breeding may evolve as a defense against brood parasites.)

more birds make for a better ability to solve problems. In the end, the benefits of cooperative parental care outweigh the costs of sharing reproduction.

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

Writing this book has changed the way I see birds, given me a new pair of binoculars, so to speak. Just for a day I’d like to experience the world the way they do, to see leaves with ultraviolet light baked into their greens, to hear and understand the minute musical differences and quick shifts in the acoustic structure of their complex calls and songs.

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

Over the past decades, ornithologists have found that birds that depend on insects for sustenance are rapidly declining.

In ancient Rome, bird-seers were priests, or augurs, who founded their divinations on the flight patterns of birds.

We would do well to watch birds more, tune in to their usual and unusual behaviors, learn while we can from their marvelous—and still often mysterious—ways of being.