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

by Jennifer Ackerman

Watch birds for a while, and you see that different species do even the most mundane things in radically different ways.

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

Fiercely territorial, they behave like Chihuahuas that think they’re mastiffs. There’s good evidence that, in some settings at least, they act like sociopaths.

(The wondrousness of these birds did not stop Gould from shooting, skinning, and eating them.)

Other animals experience other realities.

They just go for it like crazy, and then they leave.”

“Few failures . . . are as unforgiving as the failure to avoid a predator: being killed greatly decreases future fitness.”

I love this idea: that a bird with a burning stick might upend old Promethean notions of human uniqueness and ecological mastery.

Food triggers memories not just of the stuff itself but where and when it was eaten. There’s a good reason for that. So important to survival are deeply rewarding high-value food events that the brain prioritizes their recall and stores them in a privileged place.

The ravens’ intense fear of something new and unfamiliar, neophobia as it’s called, makes their playfulness seem all the more extraordinary.

the kea actually harass the falcons, dive-bombing them, all the while making play calls as if to say, ‘Come join the fun!’”

George Bernard Shaw, “We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.”

Play between fully mature animals of the opposite sex is rare in animals—and if it occurs, it’s usually part of courtship behavior or to strengthen social bonds before a hunt. But in kea, it’s not about food or sex. It’s about play.

In this way, kea play is a lot like teasing in humans, which is often a way of testing limits or tolerance.

kea seem to have a nose for doing the very thing that’s most annoying in a given moment—pulling

Teasing and clowning in humans and other primates depends on an awareness of other minds.

At some level, then, kea seem to understand the old clown saying, “Laugh and the world laughs with you . . .”

She can also eject sperm from her cloaca by defecating right after sex.

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

homosexual necrophilia in mallard ducks.

They gain nothing from the venture of picking out a male but genes—no material benefits or protection, no companionship or help with parenting. Just sperm. After mating, females go off by themselves to build a nest and raise their young alone.

From fierce protection to complete neglect, the spectrum of parenting strategies in the bird world boggles the mind.

It takes her only a few minutes to lay her eggs before the male chases her off the mound and fills the hole. Away she goes, never to interact with her eggs or young again.

The female honeyguide incubates her egg inside her body for an extra day before dumping it in the bee-eater nest. This means that her chick will hatch ahead of the host eggs, the better to ready itself for what comes next: murdering its nest mates.

The dim infrared footage of the video recordings feels downright Hitchcockian, like watching an über-creepy bird version of Psycho. Blind and in total darkness, the honeyguide chick feels around for its newly hatched nest mates, snapping at the air haphazardly until it strikes flesh. Then it repeatedly grasps its victims and bites and shakes them until they die from hemorrhaging beneath the skin.

It’s also so complex, which makes it kind of a gamble. But we thought, bugger, let’s give it a crack.”

This may sound excessive, as if the world should be overrun by little harlequins. But predators will get two-thirds of her young. And if she’s not careful, brood parasites will get the rest.

I once saw an eastern whipbird just tearing into a nest, all beak and fury.”

Tiny fairywren Who is your father? *snake chomp* Guess we’ll never know

This process of reciprocal adaptation gives rise to some astonishing results.

would make sense from an evolutionary standpoint that host species in different parts of the world have converged on a common cuckoo alarm call,” says Feeney. “Cuckoos are a unique kind of superweird threat—they’re

with cuckoos, all bets are off, and you just want everyone to know about it and come in and kick the living hell out of that cuckoo.

“Could there be an international bird word for cuckoo?”

‘Anis are like parasites that have become host-specific on themselves.’”

A social structure that functions well and supports the birds in good times is transformed into a harsh, violent, splintered system with big rewards only for the few, bullying of the smaller players, and hardship for most of the population.

One can’t help but think of Rachel Carson’s prescient words in Silent Spring: “On the morning that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices, there was now no sound.”

they might become the next big thinkers, dominant among animals. It could happen very quickly, he says. “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.”

The word auspicious, meaning “favorable or promising success,” comes from the Latin, auspex, or “observer of birds.”