The Genius of Birds
My Summary
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I really enjoyed this read. It is incredibly in depth on all things bird brain and some of the stories in there are eye opening. I never really know how impressive racing pigeons were!
Highlights
GISS, their general impression, size, and shape. — location: 129
INTELLIGENCE IS a slippery concept, even in our own species, tricky to define and tricky to measure. One psychologist describes it as “the capacity to learn or to profit by experience.” And another, as “the capacity to acquire capacity”— — location: 140
Nature is a master of bricolage, hanging on to biological bits that are useful and modifying them for new purposes. — location: 205
The grackles seize a pellet in their bills and strut over to the puddle, ceremoniously and delicately dip the pellet in the water, then flap off to eat the softened food. — location: 337
“anthropodenial,” blindness to the humanlike characteristics of other species. — location: 363
Animal cognition is generally defined as any mechanism by which an animal acquires, processes, stores, and uses information. — location: 370
bald eagles ice fishing in northern Arizona. The birds had discovered a cache of dead fathead minnows frozen under the surface of an ice-covered lake. They were seen chipping holes in the ice, then jumping up and down on the surface, using their body weight to push the minnows up through the holes. — location: 538
The ratio of brain size to body size, called brain encephalization, — location: 574
The signature chickadee-dee-dee flags a stationary predator, a raptor perched in the treetops or an eastern screech owl looming on a limb above. The number of those skipping-stone dees indicates the predator’s size and hence the degree of threat. More dees means a smaller, more dangerous predator. — location: 619
birds have only one functional ovary, on the left side; the right one was lost over evolutionary time. — location: 687
Thomas Huxley was among the first to see an evolutionary pathway from dinosaurs to modern birds— — location: 695
dinosaur named Sinosauropteryx, “Chinese dragon feather,” a key link between birds and dinosaurs. — location: 719
The 80 percent of bird species that are altricial, such as chickadees, tits, crows, ravens, and jays, — location: 768
Birds experience the same cycles of slow-wave sleep and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep that humans do— — location: 795
Birds that migrate have smaller brains than their sedentary relatives. — location: 827
The neocortex is the special seat of intelligence. Birds have no neocortex. Therefore, birds have little or no intelligence. — location: 893
cortexlike neural system for complex behavior. In ornithological parlance, it’s called the dorsal ventricular ridge, or DVR. — location: 902
The crows travel with their tools, suggesting they value them; they know a good tool when they see one and keep it for reuse. — location: 972
only four groups of animals on the planet craft their own complex tools: humans, chimps, orangutans, and New Caledonian crows. — location: 974
In British slang, boffin is a term for a kind of technological geek, someone with extensive skill in a specialized field. — location: 979
Some birds use objects as weapons. One American crow in Stillwater, Oklahoma, lobbed three pinecones at a scientist’s head as he climbed up to its nest. — location: 1044
scuffle over seed between a crow and a jay. This last example is the first documented case of a bird using an object as a weapon against another bird, — location: 1058
In fact, we owe the expression “pecking order” to studies of the social relations among chickens by the Norwegian zoologist Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe, who found that pecking orders are ladderlike, with the top rung conferring great privilege in the form of food and safety, and the bottom rung fraught with vulnerability and risk. — location: 1581
Blue jays can select fertile acorns with 88 percent accuracy. They can also count to at least five. And they can neatly mimic the piercing cry of a red-shouldered hawk, kee-ah, kee-ah—which they do often, perhaps to fool other birds into believing there’s a raptor in the vicinity, leaving more nuts for the taking. — location: 1670
About 80 percent of bird species live in socially monogamous pairs, that is, they stay with the same partner for a single breeding season or longer. — location: 1874
A male budgerigar (Melopsittacus undulatus) shows his commitment to his mate by drumming up a perfect imitation of her “contact” call, the special call she uses to keep in touch with her partner as she flies, feeds, and otherwise goes about her day. — location: 1891
After only a few days together, pair-bonded budgerigars can converge on the same contact call, with the male managing a bona fide imitation of the female. Her call becomes his. The female uses the accuracy of his imitation to judge his commitment to courting her and his suitability as a mate. — location: 1893
“It could also explain why parrot enthusiasts suggest that the ‘best talkers’ among pet budgerigars are typically males that were obtained when very young and kept in isolation from other budgerigars,” write the scientists. “Budgerigars raised under these conditions probably become imprinted on humans and may begin to court them.” — location: 1898
(If a bird’s hair cells are damaged by disease or loud noises—say, by the blasting decibels of a rock concert in a domed stadium—they can regenerate. Ours can’t.) — location: 2387
A typical songbird nestling reaches about 90 percent of his adult weight within the first ten days of his life— — location: 2630
Perhaps a male’s singing skills signal to females that he’s clever enough to cope with unpredictable environments, — location: 2661
However, it’s not clear whether a male’s song performance actually correlates with his performance on other cognitive tasks. The evidence is mixed. — location: 2643
An award for nest-building brilliance should go to the long-tailed tit, a common relative of the chickadee that lives in Europe and Asia. Its nest is a flexible bag composed of small-leaved mosses that form hooks, which are woven together with the silk loops of fluffy spider egg cocoons to create a kind of “Velcro.” — location: 2721
All twenty or so species live in the rainforests and woodlands of New Guinea and Australia; seventeen species build bowers. They are the only animals on the planet—except us, perhaps—known to use objects in extravagant displays to lure mates. — location: 2759
Bower bird
crafted bower and nips at a few sticks, tasting the paint he has — location: 2765
It all occurs at the subatomic level, involving the spinning of electrons, which suggests something extraordinary: Birds may be capable of sensing quantum effects. — location: 3285
This ability to remember the what, where, and when of specific past events is thought to be akin to human episodic memory, the remarkable capacity to remember specific personal experiences. — location: 3357
the principle of “proper mass”— — location: 3646
Shanahan found that the hub nodes in the pigeon’s hippocampus, in particular—so crucial to navigation—had very dense connections to other parts of the bird’s brain. The idea is this: If a migrating lapwing or reed warbler — location: 3764
The first sixteen birds said to have been introduced to Brooklyn in 1851 to control a plague of moths may not have taken immediately to the New World, but another bigger shipment imported from England the following year did, and in a big way. — location: 3809
Now the humble house sparrow is the world’s most widely distributed wild bird, with a global breeding population of some 540 million. — location: 3821
Of thirty-nine known house sparrow introductions, thirty-three have been successful. — location: 3835
Missouri biologist discovered a truly novel nesting site when he noticed sparrows carrying food to a working oil pump in McPherson, Kansas. In inspecting the pumps, he found they contained three nests, all with young. Two of the nests were in constant motion with each cycle of the pump, seesawing about two feet up and down every few seconds. — location: 3870
According to one account, a sparrow at the Dowse Art Museum in Lower Hutt, New Zealand, was seen opening a double set of automatic doors leading to the cafeteria. A few minutes later the sparrow activated both sensors to return outside. — location: 3893
synanthropes, — location: 4001
Sol has shown that big-brained species that are innovative, adaptable, and good at invading new environments diversify at a speedier rate. — location: 4037
The great tits of those woods time the laying and hatching of their eggs to coincide with the spring peak of the moth caterpillars they feed to their young. The caterpillars emerge from their pupae with the blossoming of trees in spring, the timing of which is dictated by temperature. As temperatures have risen over the past half century, tree blossoming and the caterpillar boom are occurring earlier than they did when the study began in 1960. If the tits were hardwired to lay their eggs at the same time every year, they would miss the caterpillar boom and their young would starve. But the birds have apparently tracked this shift and are now laying their eggs about two weeks earlier. — location: 4084
Many migratory birds also depend on precisely timed stopovers for feeding at critical points along their routes. Take the red knot, a bird of modest brain but prodigious travel. Each spring, it journeys ninety-three hundred miles from Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic. For thousands of years the red knot has relied for sustenance on a precisely timed rendezvous with horseshoe crabs laying their eggs on the beaches of the Delaware Bay. The eggs are so packed with fat that a red knot can double its body weight in just ten days of feasting. Since the 1980s, the red knot population has dropped by 75 percent, largely because of overharvesting of horseshoe crabs. — location: 4097
In the past half century, the United Kingdom has lost an average of fifty house sparrows every hour. No one is certain — location: 4118
A new study comparing the genomes of birds suggests that, genetically speaking, the turkey is closer to its dinosaur ancestors than any other bird is; its chromosomes have undergone fewer changes than other birds since the days of feathered dinosaurs. — location: 4172
Created by Niall Bell (niall@niallbell.com)