The Genius of Birds
Jennifer Ackerman’s fascinating tome is an eye opener covering recent research into the intelligence and capabilities of our avian friends that enriched my perspective and made me see what is around me on a daily basis in a different light, which to me is the whole essence of what constitutes a good book. For many decades birds were dismissed as dumb and ‘bird brained’ due to the small size of their skull contents and it was thought that brainpower had been sacrificed during their evolution in the quest for lightness and flight. She starts with an introduction to the modern evolved dinosaur mind, pointing out that it shares many convergently evolved functions with the human one, but it wired in its own way and works on different assumptions (what use have we to remember thousands of food caches and what food they contain so as to eat it before it rots for example). The first chapter outlines the genius of birds, and pointing out that like mammals some are more gifted in this respect than others, for example the diverse crow and parrot families while giving a potted history of avian evolution. Many interesting talents of our avian cousins are discussed, some with a considerable wow factor. She then goes on to discuss many recent studies into bird behaviour and a description of the bird way of being, and how our assumption of their stupidity came to be challenged by a wide variety of research over the last decades.
The remaining chapters are topical, exploring aspects of what we regard as intelligence in ourselves are manifest in the avian world, emphasising those traditionally regarded as on a unique human pathway of evolution.. The first is tool use, which includes distinctive local styles of making a particularly tool, some of which are astoundingly complex. She next discusses social life including mating and group strategies, showing how similar some bird societies are to ours. Language and birdsong fill the following chapter, including the astounding fact that many species of bird have regional dialects and accents, some mutually incomprehensible even within the same species.
'Art’ and the structures made by bower birds is next for discussion, followed by mental mapping, homing pigeons and navigation, the single largest chapter and one which also discusses the quantum aspects of a birds magnetic sense, something that wowed me when I first read it in another book on the growth of the discipline of quantum biology see http://bit.ly/2hf3Nsh). The final chapter explores sparrows, and birds that have learned to co-exist with and manipulate the human world, such as those Japanese birds who were filmed using cars stopping at red lights to crush nuts for them, rescuing the kernel in the next red light.
Written in an easy style by a well known science journalist I enjoyed this book almost as much as the secret life of trees (see http://bit.ly/2iJffg7), and it had the similar effect of making me appreciate more profoundly the existence and being of another complex multiple strand on life’s great web and the way of life that their evolution entails. While she is careful to insert many caveats about not anthropomorphising, she also points out that this can go too far, into an obsessive denial that animals have any intelligence or feelings at all, which is fine if you wish to exploit them (crushed baby chicks in the chicken industry springs to mind) but which is in the face of much evidence fundamentally untenable. People just choose to look at it this way because it is easier than the changes in lifestyle and assumptions such a realisation might bring about.
This book also left me very curious about how dinosaurs thought whenever I look at a flock of birds pecking in a field…
Loz
Image credit, Wilson’s Bird of Paradise: Serhanoksay
(Source: facebook.com)
