The Bird Way: a new look at how birds talk, work, play, parent, and think

by Jennifer Ackerman

When the English ornithologist John Gould visited Australia in the mid-nineteenth century, he observed that the great southern land contained bird “peculiarities unexampled in any other portion of the globe.” The birds there were striking, remarkable, extraordinary, and unrivalled.

For one thing, scientists are shedding biases that have blinkered research for generations. Sensory prejudices, for instance—the notion that the world we humans see, hear, and smell is the world experienced by other creatures. In fact, it’s strictly our reality, constrained by our cognitive, biological, even cultural limitations.

A few species of ducks harvested by hunters in the north were far better studied than the myriad small-winged natives of the neotropical rainforest canopy.

In 2019, scientists working with birds in the wild discovered that when two birds sing these sorts of precisely coordinated duets, their brains actually synchronize.

McLachlan sent the recordings of her vocal expressions of alarm to her family members and asked them what information they could extract from these alarm calls. “Can you tell me the category of threat? What kind of animal? Is it in the air or on the ground? How close by? How fast is it moving?”

Not everyone swallows the notion that bird vocalizations show the kind of compositionality you find in human language. As many linguists argue, all known cases of syntax in birds involve combinations of only two meaningful calls, while human language can combine different words into an infinite number of expressions. Still, as Suzuki says, his latest study suggests an interesting parallel with grammatical ability in human language and may shed light on its evolution.

The aviary is currently devoted to six of the “grim, ungainly” birds, two pairs, Siden and Juno, and Rickard and None, as well as two females, Tosta and Embla. “Some ridiculous names,” says Osvath. “The dominant male is Siden, which is Swedish for ‘silk.’ There’s nothing silky about him. But we called him Siden because we tied a little silk string around his leg when we first transported him.” And None? “When we named the chicks for the experiment protocol, she was the only one without an identifying ring, so we just wrote ‘None.’ ” There’s a seventh raven on the premises, but she’s wild. “She doesn’t understand that she’s wild, so she hangs around,” says Osvath. “And when we do experiments, we open the aviary, and she just comes in, participates, and then at the end, walks out. In the ethics section of grant applications, it’s difficult to explain: She’s wild, but her participation is completely voluntary.”

Ducks do something called coordinated loafing, hanging out together. But real social play exists mostly among birds that live in complex societies where alliances are fluid and constantly shifting, like ravens and Australian magpies.

In most animals, play seems to be a powerful trigger for the release of dopamine, which is active in the reward system in the brain, and also for endogenous opioids, which are essential for sensations of pleasure.

Kea are also very good at learning from one another. One test of this involves a “tube removal” task. The inside of a small tube is smeared with a reward—butter, a big favorite for kea—and the tube is placed at the bottom of a long upright pole. To get at the treat, the kea must slide the tube up over the top end of the pole, which requires climbing up the pole while pushing the little tube with its bill. Kea accomplish this in just a few attempts, even if they’ve never seen the setup before. But when one kea watches another, it emulates the first bird’s strategy and completes the task at first try.

He began his career investigating Antechinus, a group of small, mouse-like marsupials that exhibit the strange phenomenon of semelparity. Soon after mating, males die. But after years studying the bizarre mammals, he says, he realized that he “was not having nearly as much fun tramping through leech-infested rainforest as one of [his] graduate students was having teasing apart the intricate sex lives of superb fairy-wrens in the croissant-infested Botanic Gardens in Canberra.”

The magpies seem to specialize. Around 50 percent of them are pedestrian magpies—they only swoop pedestrians. Cyclist magpies swoop only cyclists. And then there are magpies that specialize in hammering posties—the postal workers on little motorbikes that go whizzing up the street, postbox to postbox. In his research, Jones found that magpies that attack cyclists will attack any cyclist. And those that attack posties will attack any postie. “We think the cyclist and postie magpies are generalizing,” says Jones. He believes it has something to do with speed. “They’ll be coming after you, and if you stop and get off the bike and walk it, they sort of look around as if to say, ‘Where is that fast thing that I was just chasing?’ ” But the pedestrian magpies attack only certain people. “That’s the other big thing we discovered,” says Jones. “These birds recognize individuals. They live in a little territory and they never leave it, so they know every human that lives around the place. They see kids growing up, and they remember them. These birds are very, very smart. They’re watching us and interpreting our behavior.” 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 that work together to tackle challenges may have a leg up on those that try to do so alone. This may point to why many Australian birds are so extreme in their behavior and so intelligent. They often live as residents in complex societies, establish lifelong bonds with their group mates, and have long breeding seasons, so their interactions are collectively more complex than among birds in the Northern Hemisphere, which are often migratory and live together in pairs and only for a relatively brief breeding season.

For white-winged choughs, difficult ecological conditions such as drought tear the fabric of their society, setting the scene for societal collapse, power struggles, and complex Machiavellian social tactics—like kidnapping. Violence erupts. Some individuals triumph, but “in circumstances where it’s almost impossible to live and breed without harassment,” says Heinsohn. 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.