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

by Jennifer Ackerman

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. In terms of flying distance, the Arctic tern takes all, circling the world in orbit with the seasons. The bird flies from its breeding grounds in Greenland and Iceland to its wintering grounds in Antarctica—a round trip of almost 44,000 miles, the longest migration ever recorded. Over the thirty years of its life, a tern may fly about 1.5 million miles, the equivalent of three trips to the moon and back.

Males are flashier than females, which are often a dull color so that they blend in with their surroundings while they’re incubating eggs. Adults are more colorful than youngsters. Birds are brighter in the breeding season.

“Extreme behavior in birds is more likely in Australia than anywhere else.” 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.

The point is this: Novel or unusual behavior is often intelligent behavior.

In 2016, a team of international scientists reported their discovery of one secret: birds pack more brain cells into a smaller space. When the team counted the number of neurons in the brains of twenty-eight different bird species ranging in size from the pint-size zebra finch to the six-foot-tall emu, they found that birds have higher neuron counts in their small brains than do mammals or even primates of similar brain size. Neurons in bird brains are much smaller, more numerous, and more densely packed than those in mammalian and primate brains. This tight arrangement of neurons makes for efficient high-speed sensory and nervous systems. In other words, say the researchers, bird brains have the potential to provide much higher cognitive clout per pound than do mammalian brains.

Moreover, says neuroscientist Suzana Herculano-Houzel, who led the research, in the brains of parrots and songbirds, most of the “extra” neurons occur in the pallium region of the forebrain, the part of the bird brain that corresponds to our cerebral cortex and is typically associated with intelligent behavior. In fact, big parrots like macaws and cockatoos, as well as corvids such as ravens and crows, have higher neuron counts in the forebrain than do monkeys with much larger brains—in some cases, twice as many neurons, with more connections between them—which explains why these birds are capable of cognitive feats comparable to those of great apes.

In building powerful brains, says Herculano-Houzel, nature has two strategies: It can tinker with the number of neurons and their size, and also, it can change their distribution in different parts of the brain. In birds, nature uses both tactics—to brilliant effect.

Ornithological vision has been skewed not just by the hemispheric bias of researchers but also by their gender and gender bias. Until quite recently, most ornithologists were men, and research tended to focus on what male birds were up to; the part played by female birds in the life histories of their species, from female ornamental traits to breeding systems, was often downplayed or ignored.

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 dawn chorus as a communal and collective phenomenon in which individual birds negotiate and affirm their relationships while minimizing conflict. “It’s a reaffirmation of place and belonging every morning with mates, family groups, neighbors, and flocks,” he says. “By avoiding physical confrontations, the dawn chorus reduces risks and stress and conserves energy. It’s a tapestry of vocal behaviors,” he says, “and it may be the greatest evolutionary achievement of songbirds, allowing them to coexist and to become the wildly successful and diverse group they are.”

Science is just beginning to parse the complexity and meaning of bird vocalizations. Even common species such as American robins make more than twenty different types of sounds, most of which remain mysterious in purpose. The simple honk of a goose, it turns out, contains unexpected richness and intricacy; and calls that sound simple and uniform, such as those of penguins, vary in their acoustics, helping penguins recognize one another and choose mates.

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. These dialects play a role in courtship—females of some species prefer males with songs that include syllables from their own song vocabulary—and also, in resolving territorial disputes, allowing birds to distinguish between local and foreign individuals and settle conflicts without fighting.

“It’s the migratory birds that have lost female song,” explains Langmore, who was part of the study. “Migrants have a very different pattern of territoriality and pairing than in the tropics. Typically, the male will arrive on the breeding grounds singing his head off, and the females will fly in and listen, and they’ll plunk down on the chosen male’s territory. Then they’ll have a very short breeding season. They just go for it like crazy, and then they leave.”

Flee alarm calls send birds away from a threat; mobbing calls bring them toward it.

More notes means a greater menace. This rule holds true across species and calling contexts and even continents.

Clearly birds are master eavesdroppers, listening in on alarms sounded by other birds. So are other animals. In fact, one study showed that more than seventy species of vertebrates eavesdrop on alarm calls: Birds eavesdrop on other birds, mammals on other mammals, mammals on birds, and birds on mammals. In North America, chipmunks and red squirrels grasp the meaning of bird aerial alarm calls. In turn, chickadees understand the alarm squeaks of red squirrels and will take cover in response. Three species of lizards even attend to bird alarm calls. Yellow-casqued hornbills of West Africa can distinguish between the eagle and leopard alarm calls of Diana monkeys.

For millennia, humans have used languages consisting solely of whistles to organize, argue, gossip, even flirt across distances. We think of whistles as a way of getting attention or carrying a tune, incapable of conveying much meaning. But go to Antia in Greece, the foothills of the Himalayas, the Canary Islands, the Bering Strait, Ethiopia’s Omo Valley, the Brazilian Amazon, and dozens of other remote places, and you may hear volleys of human whistled chirps, cryptic trills, and fluted duets, entire conversations of lilting whistles a lot like bird sounds that communicate with all the subtleties of human speech.

Like humans, birds will go to great lengths to get a good meal. They have figured out how to dig up invisible food, crack open its armor, discard its poisonous or unpalatable parts, and fish it out of hidden places with specially crafted tools. They’ve learned how to process impossible amounts of spatial information to remember where food is, manipulate their prey, even detect food through senses we thought they didn’t have.

But as most of us now know, turkey vultures have gotten a bad rap. The truth is, those naked heads relieved of adornment are extremely hygienic—gory stuff just doesn’t stick. And it’s a lie that vultures particularly relish a ripe, rotting mess. They actually prefer fresher carrion. As such, they perform a vital, and vastly underrated, service to the environment: the quick, competent cleanup and recycling of dead creatures.

Vultures are nature’s sanitary workers. Because they feed in groups and eat rapidly—each bird downing more than two pounds of meat a minute—they can rapidly consume whole carcasses. Their guts are acidic enough to destroy the agents of disease, such as cholera and anthrax, so there’s little risk of spreading contamination from an infected carcass. That’s not the case with more leisurely mammalian carrion eaters such as rats or dogs or coyotes. What happens when vultures vanish, people learned the hard way in India and Pakistan more than a decade ago. There, a mass die-off of old-world vultures caused by an arthritis drug in the flesh of dead cattle led to an eruption of rabies. Dogs took over feeding on the carcasses, and the canine population exploded, along with the spread of the deadly disease.

Puffins have such a fine sense of smell that they can find their colony by scent alone from a distance of nearly five hundred miles. House finches can detect predators by smell. Even ducks have a well-developed olfactory system. 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. But as Gabrielle Nevitt has discovered, turkey vultures as sovereigns of olfactory foraging have only one set of real rivals in the bird world.

Guanay cormorants, which live and nest in colonies along the Peruvian coast, form a floating raft of birds that shifts in orientation continuously over the course of the day to indicate the direction of ephemeral prey patches. Every cormorant leaving the colony to fish joins the raft for guidance before heading for feeding grounds. How remarkable: Birds create an actual living compass for food finding.

Raptors hunt at fires around the world—in the grasslands and savannas of Australia, Ghana, Brazil, Panama, Honduras, and Papua New Guinea—feasting on the easy pickings of prey fleeing the conflagration. There’s even a word for it: pyric-carnivory. Fire acts as a beater, driving organisms out of the brush. In the savannas of southern Africa, kestrels and jackal buzzards wheel around wildfires and prey on small mammals and reptiles injured, exposed, or killed by flames. Migrating Mississippi kites have been seen feasting on clouds of insects boiling up from summer fires in the grasslands of Texas.

Play is a strange behavior in any animal, says Osvath. “There are so many good reasons not to do it.” It takes a lot of energy that could be used for other purposes—growing, for instance. It’s also inherently risky. “If you’re out in the wild, and everyone is playing, then no one is paying attention to any potential threat. A bird at play is particularly conspicuous to predators, which are never far away.” The behavior seems at best extravagant; at worst, downright dangerous. “Out in the wild, playing must be very important,” says Osvath. “Otherwise, why would you make yourself vulnerable in this way? It’s a world of eagles, owls, even wolves out there. Distraction at the wrong moment could mean the end of you.”

Laughter in humans is far more than just a reaction to something funny. It’s a basic communication tool, a building block of society, defusing social tension and building social bonds. It also enhances both mood and well-being.

That same year scientists delivered the shocking news that one in four birds in the US and Canada have disappeared since 1970—nearly three billion birds. The vanished species span the spectrum from meadowlarks, warblers, and swallows, to common backyard birds such as robins and sparrows. They’re gone from all habitats, seashore, forest, grasslands, desert, tundra, probably due primarily to habitat loss from development and agriculture, as well as pesticide use.