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

by Jennifer Ackerman

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. “We speculate that the birds build up a map of this olfactory landscape over time from experience,” says Nevitt, “and use it to guide them to likely areas for prey.” This is the sort of news that turns the kaleidoscope for a new worldview: of seabirds as feathered hounds, yes, but also of the planet itself, the air above the ocean as an invisible landscape full of subtle, swirling features sensed by creatures far better attuned than we.

Pied kingfishers, black-crowned night herons, and green herons living in parks have learned that the bread people throw to ducks and geese will also draw minnows. They’ve taken to plucking up bits of bread and placing them on the water, then waiting with Job-like patience for a minnow to nibble and seizing it with a rapid thrust of their long, sharp bills.

It’s one thing to exploit an already raging fire; it’s quite another to start one yourself. But at least three species of raptors in northern Australia seem to be doing exactly that. Like raptors elsewhere in the world, fire hawks, as they’re called collectively—black kites, brown falcons, and whistling kites—hunt in the vicinity of bushfires. 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.