Birds Are Amazing

We all know that birds can astound. I just read a book that explains some of the why and how and where.

A World On The Wing by Scott Weidensaul is an intriguing book.

The stories you'll end up talking about at the dinner table are numerous. The bird's migrations are nearly unbelievable.

Because birding scientists now have minitature tracking devices they can attach to birds, they've learned that their previous ideas about how far birds migrate are very much understated. There are birds that fly 50,000 miles a year. There are birds that take to the air and don't land for months. There are birds that live in one small area during our spring and summer (breeding season) and then fly halfway around the world each year to another small area in our fall and winter. (And some of them have a second breeding season for the Southern Hemisphere's spring and summer. The precision of their travels is astounding.

Take California's Swainson's Hawk, a big population of which, during our spring and summer, live in a small valley north of Mount Shasta. Come fall and winter, they fly 9,000 miles one way to a small valley in Argentina. As spring returns to the north, the birds fly back. Each year, they repeat. The round trip is 18,000 miles.

There are too many such stories to recount. I'll let you dive into the book and enjoy what you learn.

I highly recommend A World On The Wing. I was amazed. I think you will be too. 

More Animals (Birds) That Reveal We Humans Aren't So Special

 The way we humans think we're so special would be funny if it weren't so sad. Less than 100 years ago, people still thought we were the only creatures with culture. We thought animals were not only dumb, they had no complexity to their society. They certainly didn't teach each other complex tasks. They didn't make and use tools. And they didn't carry on cultural traditions. They didn't mourn their dead. They didn't invent new behaviors and then teach those behavior to others. They didn't make plans and then carry them out. They didn't have self-awareness. And they didn't recognize themselves in mirrors.

Now we've learned that many animals do all of these things and more. Whales, dolphins, chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, elephants, dogs, pigs, and birds such as parrots, pigeons, and crows.

New research shows just how dramatic and impressive animal intelligence is.

Dolphins are bilingual. They speak a language specific to their own species when they are around their own kind, and they switch to a more generic language when they encounter other dolphin species. They cooperate with whales to help each other hunt fish.

After chimpanzees watched humans using sign language, they began to develop it themselves and then taught it to their young. 

Orangutans can use a hammer and nails, and - if it suits their needs - hide items from people. One stole a key from a zookeeper and nonchalantly hid it in his mouth when the man came looking for it.

Elephants are so socially sophisticated and empathetic, they will sacrifice themselves for the good of the group. 

Parrots can learn hundreds of words and their meanings. Pigeons can recognize different people and can learn the difference between impressionist paintings and abstract expressionist paintings. Crows can invent tools to suit their needs and memorize the routes of garbage trucks so they can be in the best places when the trucks come by with potential food. Crows also have complex death rituals when one of their group dies.

Now, magpies have shown altruistic behavior, helping each other to remove tracking devices that humans put on them.  There is no advantage to a magpie to help others like this. It is a cultural characteristic much more complicated than doing something that merely helps find food or a mate.

You can read about it here:

https://theconversation.com/altruism-in-birds-magpies-have-outwitted-scientists-by-helping-each-other-remove-tracking-devices-175246

And when one cockatoo learned to open a wheeled garbage container in Australia, it taught the technique to others. Now, cockatoos all over have learned the trick:

https://theconversation.com/clever-cockatoos-in-southern-sydney-have-learned-to-open-kerb-side-bins-and-it-has-global-significance-164794

Which Carnivore Is The Most Successful Hunter?

 We all know the basics of the food chain. Plants use sunlight, water, and soil to grow. Herbivores are the myriad animals that eat plants. And carnivores are the animals that eat other animals.

We focus a lot on the big, magnificent carnivores, from lions and tigers to grizzly bears to great white sharks to killer whales.

What doesn't get mentioned much, however, is that most of those carnivores don't have high rates of hunting success. When lions go after a meal, their success rate is reportedly as low as 10%. Same for many other carnivores, such as wolves. 

That might explain why carnivores regularly take the easy route and steal kills from other carnivores. Grizzly bears take food that wolves kill. Bald eagles steal fish that were caught by ospreys. Lions steal the kills of several animals, including those of the African wild dog, 50-pound predators that hunt in packs and live in the southern parts of Africa.

Wait a minute. 500-pound lions rely on prey that was taken down by 50-pound wild dogs?

Yup. It turns out that African Wild Dogs - a distant relative of domesticated dogs - are very intelligent and have a highly complex social structure. They do everything cooperatively, including coordinating their hunting activity. 

While wolves commonly hunt in packs of 4 to 6, African Wild Dogs hunt in packs of 20 or more. They have a sophisticated hunting strategy and they communicate among each other during the hunt. 

As a result, their hunting success rate is 80%, one of the highest success rates in the animal kingdom.

Enjoy the beauty and smarts of these animals, because it's estimated that they will be extinct in the not-too-distant future. Why? Because, like so many carnivores, they require lots of uninterrupted territory. And that territory is being fragmented by human development.

You can read more about these wild dogs here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_wild_dog

Humans And The Big Primates... We Are So Similar

 

With the holidays approaching and people getting together, it is time to reflect on what it means to have companionship. There are some animals that are solitary, like some of the big cats. But they seem to be rare. Many animals crave companionship with each other. 

If we look at our closest animal relatives, bonabos, chimpanzees, orangutans, and gorillas, it's almost like watching humans. They share meals, they hug, they bring gifts, they have many complex social rituals.

Scott Simon at NPR did a story on animals hugging. It's worth a read or a listen. Here's the link:

Scott Simon NPR.org

You Want Smart? Calves Can Be Potty Trained

Last week, I wrote about squirrel smarts. So while we're on the subject...

Everyone knows cattle are pretty dumb, right? Ranchers raise them, slaughter them, and people eat them. We don't give much thought to their intelligence.

It turns out that calves can be potty trained with about the same quickness as potty training a puppy. (They didn't try it with adult cattle. But we all know that potty training is best done young!)

As reported by Scott Simon on NPR https://www.npr.org/2021/09/18/1038533121/with-a-little-sweet-encouragement-calves-prove-cows-can-quickly-be-potty-trained, cattle produce a great deal of urine, among other waste. Cattle urine has lots of nutrients that can be turned into fertilizer, but only if the urine can be collected.

So scientists wanted to know if they could take young calves and train them to urinate in a certain place, the better to collect it. They devised a standard kind of reward. Basically, it worked like this: Urinate over here and we'll give you a sugar treat.

The calves figured it out very fast. 

Read the story. It's very fun. You'll never drive by another calf without thinking about how smart they are.

Squirrel Intelligence Is No Small Thing

 I read about a study that revealed two remarkable squirrel facts. 

1. Squirrels can remember hundreds of locations where they've stashed food.

2. When squirrels know that other squirrels are watching, they fake where they stash food, pretending to dig holes and put food inside and then, when not under observation, they sneak off and hide the food somewhere else.

Deception is a widely recognized mark of intelligence. Dog deception has been well documented. In controlled studies, dogs will deceive and manipulate people in order to get treats. Zoo keepers have lots of stories about how primates deceive humans, like the orangutan that hides something a human wants by tucking it in his cheek and then pretending to "help look" for the missing item.

Now you can add squirrels to the mix.

Yesterday, we watched a Douglas Squirrel exhibit some dramatic food behavior. (This in the Sierra foothills while we are still evacuated from Tahoe.)

The squirrel appeared to watch other squirrels and act one way if other squirrels were visible and another way if they weren't visible. 

For example, this squirrel ran up the trunk of a 100-foot White fir. At the top, it cut off the cones (which grow near the very top of fir trees). The heavy, green cones came crashing down, slamming onto the ground with enough force to knock you out or kill you if your head was in the wrong place. 

After many cones littered the ground, the squirrel came back down. He made a show of looking around the ground (I'm not kidding), and picked up a cone in his mouth (a real feat of strength considering the cone probably weighed a third or even half as much as the squirrel). He ran north into the forest, carrying the cone. In a minute, he came back with no cone. 

He looked around again, picked up another cone, then ran off with that one, again to the north. 

After several trips carrying cones to the north, he paused, looked around, then ran up the trunk of a nearby Ponderosa pine, also about 100 feet tall. Soon he came back down the Ponderosa pine carrying a White fir cone. It seemed like he was moving a bit slower than before. When he got to the ground, which was still littered with white fir cones he'd previously cut and dropped, he looked around (looking for other squirrels?) and ran off to the east. We saw him dig a small hole under a Black oak tree, bury the cone, then run back.

The squirrel repeated this process, running up the Pondersa pine, coming back down with a White fir cone, pausing, heading east, and burying the cone under an oak.

After a few trips, he went back to his previous behavior. He ran up the White fir, cut and dropped some cones, came down the fir, picked up a cone that he'd already dropped from high up, and ran into the forest to the north.

We tried to make sense of this strange behavior, picking up cones off the ground and running to the north, then carrying cones down from the tree canopy and burying them to the east. Add into the mix that he used a Ponderosa pine as his highway to the sky whenever he wanted to carry a white fir cone down instead of merely picking it up off the ground.

There might be many explanations. But the one that made the most sense to us was deception. His obvious moves of picking up cones off the ground were followed by carrying them north.

The sneakier moves of going up a Ponderosa pine, leaping across from the top of the pine to the top of the fir to get a cone, and leaping back, seemed very much like a routine designed to make his varied efforts less obvious to any less industrious squirrels who might want to simply steal his cache rather than going to all the work themselves.

Intelligence? Major league by my judgment.

When Covid Cuts Human Noise, Birds Sing Sweeter

 

 

Covid 19 may be hell for people, but, in Shakespeare's words it "Becomes the touches of sweet harmony" for birds.

An interesting thing happened when everybody stayed home in San Francisco and The City went silent.

A researcher noticed that the song of the male White-Crowned Sparrow got softer and more nuanced - sexier-sounding to the females.

I guess we should all take a lesson. Silence offers so much.

The links below have the story. One of the links has a 4-second video you can click on  to hear the song. Enjoy!

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/09/when-covid-19-silenced-cities-birdsong-recaptured-its-former-glory

https://www.popsci.com/story/environment/more-bird-song-pandemic/

Do Animals Have Rights?

We love our dogs. But do they have rights?

Do other animals have rights?

It appears to be such a simple question. Our impulsive answer seems to be "Of course, animals have rights." Or, "They certainly should have rights."

But immediately, the idea becomes complicated. 

What would those rights be? The right to be left alone? The right to not be tortured? The right to have their territory undisturbed? The right to not have their culture (or whatever you want to call it) be destroyed? The right to not face unnecessary pain? The right to not be treated in a way that we wouldn't treat humans? The right to not be imprisoned in a small cage? The right to not be killed for sport (fun)? The right to not be forced to do degrading work? The right to not be eaten?

Let's go to the most basic right of all, the right to live. Do animals have that right? Do humans have that right? Is the human right to live greater than an animal's right to live?

In my recent book, TAHOE HIT, a character poses a question about this to Owen. To make it more poignant, the question comes with a spin. Instead of asking if a man has more right to life than a dog, the question is, "Does a very bad man automatically have more right to life than a very good dog?" The questioner goes on to elaborate that the bad man could be abusive and violent and wicked, while the dog could be sweet and kind and a friend and protector of its human family. I made those qualifiers to put the question in sharper focus.

Obviously, I wanted the question to be thought-provoking. I assumed (and still do) that some people would say that all humans have more right to life than any animals. I imagined the subject would - or could - fall into the realm of "God made humans to be very special, and humans thus have a sacred right to life, more so than any other creatures." I even assumed I'd get some angry email on the subject.

What's interesting is that of the many people who have sent me email, all said something like, "A very good dog absolutely has more right to life than a very bad man."

Of course, people love their dogs. And elephants and dolphins and birds and horses. Are our feelings about them influenced by how beautiful and lovable they are? Can we reconcile laws that say you can't sell horses or dogs for slaughter for their meat, but it's okay to squish spiders? What about mice? Squirrels? If a skunk takes up residence in your crawl space, refuses to come out, and makes your house unlivable with its spray, is its right to life any less?

Of course, we might say, this is my house and I was here first, and you can't invade and live in my house.

But when the housing and shopping mall developers bulldoze the land and "homes" of thousands of animals, have we not done the same thing? The deer and birds and bear and fish and gophers and mountain lion were doing just fine without us. Then we came along and destroyed their world. And we justified it by saying that people needed the housing and the jobs. 

Beneath our behavior lurks a familiar hubris. We humans are the lords of the Earth. Animals are just, well, animals. If our supertankers leak oil and destroy ocean habitat, that's simply part of the price of running our cars and heating our houses and creating all those trillions of plastic things that we throw away, some of which wash into those once-pure oceans. If our greenhouse gases melt the arctic ice and the polar bears and penguins go extinct, that's also part of the price.

The implication is that whatever the rights of those animals, our rights supersede them.

In TAHOE HIT, there is mention of the great naturalist Aldo Leopold. 100 years ago, he proposed that we leave "Blank spots on the map." Areas with no roads, no development, no wilderness trails and campsites, no hotels, no fishing or fish stocking of lakes, no dams, no hunting, no airplane overflights, no mosquito insecticides, no people."  

It doesn't take much observation to realize that people have gone everywhere on the planet, even to the depths of the deepest ocean trenches. And everywhere we've gone, we've taken over and dominated. There are no more blank spots on the map. From the perspective of most animals and other life, we've made the Earth much worse, not better.

Scientists say we're in the midst of the 6th greatest extinction in Earth's history. Previous mass extinctions of plants and animals have come as a result of huge volcanic activity or impacts by asteroids, events that made our planet inhospitable to life for many years.

This new mass extinction that is unfolding is called the Anthropocene Extinction. A fancy word that refers to the fact that this new extinction of life is caused by human activity. Greenhouse/fossil fuel gases that lead to climate change. Habitat destruction that takes away the "home territory" of millions of lifeforms, both plant and animal. Scientists say that millions of plant and animal species have already gone extinct, mostly from climate change. Some, of course, we've directly killed off. The California Grizzly. The Passenger pigeon.

What makes the tragedy worse is that we have the technology to stop and even reverse this decline. We know how to make renewable energy - wind farms and solar farms, etc - and we know how to implement conservation sufficient to create a "carbon neutral" society. (More fancy words to describe an economy that doesn't burn oil, which produces all those greenhouse gases.)

What's in the way of making this better, less-damaging world? There are lots of reasons. The biggest may be spineless politicians who don't have the political will to make a better world. Why? Because they are afraid that whoever is unhappy with change (there are always some people who are unhappy with change), they will lose votes and be out of their cushy jobs. So many politicians spread fear and distrust, as they always have through the ages. And some politicians support policies that nearly everyone knows are bad for the Earth. Why? It's hard to know. The drill-baby-drill attitude and the effort to take away protections of remaining wilderness areas only make sense if you want to appeal to people who don't care about the future of the planet or who believe in the unimaginable conspiracy/hoax notion that the Earth isn't actually changing. Those dry mountains that used to be covered in vast glaciers, that's photo-shopped. Like the moon landing was photo-shopped. Like the Earth is flat.

Meanwhile the rights of animals - whatever those rights are - will continue to be trampled by people.

Maybe if we step back from all the arguing and simply look at all the beautiful animals, we can frame things differently. What's good for the zebras and the tuna and the flamingos, is good for us. Stop arguing about the current events.

Instead, consider your dog. Does he or she have rights? What are you going to do to ensure the continuation of those rights? Somewhere in your answer may be the survival of our Earth, what Carl Sagan called our Pale Blue Dot, floating lonely in the vastness of space. Protecting animal rights might just result in protecting our planet.

Wolves Play Fetch??!!

Wolf pups don't play fetch, right?
Or do they?

Dogs were domesticated from wolves a long time ago, maybe 30,000 years. The result of that domestication produced animals (dogs) that were very focused on humans, almost as if humans were gods to dogs. Humans provide dogs with shelter and food and companionship and protection. In return, dogs pay attention to every little thing regarding humans, and they can read human cues better than any other animal, better than chimps or elephants or cats or parrots. Some people believe that dogs can read human cues better than other people can! (Just try to get ready to take your dog for a walk without letting her know. It doesn't work. She always knows when you're going for a walk. Even if you spell all of your words and do your best to hide your intentions, she'll still know. How does she do it? I don't know!)

Dogs serve as guards and hunters and companions. They haul sleds with heavy loads. They pay attention to every little sound in your house when you are asleep. They sit on your couch and eat popcorn with you. They also serve as playmates like, for example, playing fetch.

Modern wolves are very different than modern dogs. In some ways they are more intelligent and better at solving puzzles. But when it comes to understanding humans, they don't come close to dogs. Dogs get what we want, and they try to deliver for us. Throw a ball and they go fetch it. Wolves don't do that.

Except, wait, maybe they do. A researcher was doing tests, showing that wolves won't fetch. She used multiple litters of wolf pups for subjects. She was thorough in every aspect of demonstrating that wolves won't retrieve a ball.

But then some did.

Another wrench in the science gears!

Here's a link: to the NPR story on wolves that fetch.

ENJOY!

Rats Driving Cars!

The news this week that scientists have observed pigs using tools - finding pieces of wood to dig with - comes as no surprise. The list of animals that use tools, which is considered a sign of high intelligence, is large.

But the news that scientists have taught rats to drive little cars is a real surprise. First of all, most of us probably have a hard time thinking of rats as smart like pigs or dogs or dolphins or all the primates. Second, it sort of elevates rats in our minds. We (I) simply don't think of rats the way we (I) think of dogs. (Maybe I don't want to.)

Here's what happened. Scientists at the University of Richmond developed little vehicles in which a rat could fit. They figured out a steering mechanism. Then they taught the rats to drive using Fruit Loops as a reward. The rats quickly figured it out.

When the researchers placed Fruit Loops in different places around the lab, the rats got very good at driving their cars to each different Fruit Loop, where they could stick their heads out the little car window and grab their treat.

The study didn't just end there. The scientists wondered if this new, complicated skill would stress the rats out. So they rigged them with sensors to study rat stress (mini EEGs). The results were the opposite of what they expected. As the rats zoomed around in their cars, looking for Fruit Loop treats, they actually got calmer.

Hey, it's relaxing to go out for a ride, right? 

If this experiment had been about teaching chimps or gorillas to drive, we'd be so pleased to watch the results.

But these are rats!

Wow. 

How Literate Are Bears?

Back in 2004 there was a very fun and informative book about punctuation titled Eats Shoots and Leaves.

The title was a fun joke. With no commas (Eats Shoots and Leaves), it referred to what Panda Bears eat.

With the addition of commas (Eats, Shoots, and Leaves), it referred to a robber who has a meal at a diner, then pulls out a gun and shoots it as he's robbing the place.

I think of that book every time I see one of these dumpsters. Do you see the period after the word 'Bears?' I always have the urge to get out some white paint and change the period to a comma!

What Your Dog Can Do That Chimps Cannot

Chimps, Bonobos, and the other great apes are our closest relatives. They are highly intelligent and have complex societies that are surprisingly like ours. Yet there is something that your dog gets that they don't.

Pointing.

With very little training, your dog knows what you mean when you point at something. It will look where you're pointing because it knows that you want it to. Maybe it's which cup to knock over to find a treat. Or maybe it's a bird off in the next field.

But despite lots of effort, researchers can't seem to get our primate cousins to understand this basic skill.

Sure, there are no doubt lots of perfectly good reasons why chimps and bonobos don't understand pointing. Or maybe they do understand it, but don't care. (Cats, anyone?)

Two of our Great Danes got excited when we pointed. It didn't matter if it was a squirrel in a tree or a plane in the sky or a tennis ball in the grass or a treat we'd hidden. When we'd point, they would immediately turn and stare, frowning, focusing, looking for whatever it was that we were trying to indicate.

Smart animals, those dogs we all love.

Astonishing Animal Intelligence

A new study by some scientists at the universities of Cambridge and Auckland shows that crows can figure out problems better than nearly any other animals.

The scientists created a type of food vending machine that dispensed treats when a paper token was inserted. Then they gave crows torn pieces of paper in a range of sizes. Only pieces of a certain size would make the machine work.

The crows experimented with the different pieces of paper until they figured out which sizes produced the treat. They quickly got good at picking up the correct-size pieces to use to get food from the machine.

Then the researchers removed all the pieces of torn paper.

After a period of time, the scientists gave the crows some large sheets of paper.

Working only from memory, the crows used their beaks and feet to tear the paper into smaller pieces. If their torn paper pieces were too small or too large, the vending machine wouldn't work.

The result? Crows remembered the task and the required size of the "food token" necessary, and they got treats from the vending machine.

This ability is something almost no animals can do.

So the next time you gaze up at a crow, it's fun to remember their amazing smarts.

P.S. The article is as "dry" as you might expect in a scientific journal, but here it is for the curious:
Nature Scientific Reports

A Bomb-Sniffing Dog At Work

We humans have a small-but-regular assorment of bad individuals among us. We've developed a lot of techniques to identify the bad eggs. Our techniques are useful in varying degrees. But one of the best ways to save us from ourselves is to bring in a dog.

Despite amazing machines we've developed that can sniff the air for any indications of chemicals that are associated with bad intentions, none is yet as good as a dog's nose.

A few days ago, we were coming back from Italy and caught the new JetBlue non-stop from JFK to Reno. The airport was a mob scene, with thousands of summer travelers lining up to go through airport security. The TSA was doing their best to cope. (I wouldn't have that job for anything.)

As the line grew, they suddenly interrupted the routine and stopped all the inspections. The crowds piled up. We couldn't tell why they would suspend the searches. The Airtrain and cabs and shuttles and Uber drivers kept dropping off travelers, and they flowed into the JetBlue terminal with no place to go except to get in the line, which went back and forth through the maze they'd set up to organize a huge crowd.

After 30 minutes of no activity, we finally got a hint of why they'd stopped the inspections. A Department of Homeland Security officer appeared with a German Shorthair Pointer, one of the preferred breeds (along with Belgian Malinois and Labs) that they train to sniff out explosives.

The dog had a DHS vest on. The handler took her around the edges of the maze that contained the crowd, letting the dog get familiar with the ambient scents of the airport. Then the handler brought the dog to a place adjacent to where the people in line would pass through once they started moving.

Other officers shouted out instructions to the crowd.

"Do not pet the dog. Do not reach out to the dog. Walk through the line. Keep moving."

They opened the end gate of the maze and let the people start to pass.

The dog stood, head down as if sniffing near the floor. The crowds moved past. The dog never looked up. Her job was just to sniff the air. If she smelled any of the scents she was trained to notice, she'd sit down next to her handler.

The huge crowd all walked past the dog, single file. The dog stared at the floor, her nostrils flexing. Her focus was intense. She radiated intelligence.

It was an impressive scene. Hundreds of travelers and an entire airport terminal were shut down. Whether or not the system would restart was dependent on the response of a single dog.

We eventually got past the dog's inspection. The flights eventually continued.

The travelers were of course worried. Having a DHS dog brought in to assess a crowd suggested that the TSA/DHS had acquired some disturbing information. On the other hand, when the DHS dog didn't "alert," it made us all feel much safer.

We can know that there are armed Federal Air Marshals incognito on the planes. But that does us no good if there is something really bad on the plane. So, in the end, the giant operation that is an airport comes down to a single dog, focused, well-trained. An animal with the concentration, and smarts, and a nose so powerful that it can detect the equavalent of a half teaspoon of sugar (or whatever else) in an Olympic swimming pool of water.

Let's all give thanks to dogs.

Can You Speak Killer Whale?

Love the news about the Orca (killer whale) that is mimicking human speech. It's not very easy for the uninitiated to understand. And it certainly doesn't sound accurate the way parrots can talk.

But a whale??? Wow.

Just to help, they've made sound graphs of people saying "Hello" and "Goodbye" and counting to three. Then they make a sound graph of the whale doing the same thing. The whale's speech is sometimes much higher pitch and screechier. (I'm a writer so I can make up words like screechier.) And sometimes it's low and gravely. But the sound graph, adjusted for pitch, is very similar.

Watch this youtube video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqB1jRVw7Bw

http://www.newsweek.com/watch-killer-whales-learned-say-hello-bye-bye-through-blowholes-795776

If you doubt just how amazing this is, consider how well people say hello and goodbye in whale language.

Once again, animals are smarter than we think.

Humpback Whales... Wow!

Humpback whales can be more than 50 feet long and weigh over 80,000 pounds. Like all cetaceans, Humpbacks are highly intelligent and have a complex social structure rivaling our own.

Like most whales, Humpbacks possess much (oil, blubber, meat) that can entice humans. So how have we responded to them over the years?

People are clever and rapacious in their view of the Earth's resources. So naturally, we hunted Humpback whales to the brink of extinction.

Fortunately, some forward-thinking people saw the big picture, and in 1966 a moratorium on hunting most Humpbacks was put in place. In the decades since, the Humpback whale population has recovered somewhat.

Although Humpback hunting is still largely banned, the whales still suffer from the effects of humans. Their habitats are threatened. They get hit and killed by ships. They get tangled in fishing nets. They suffer from human-caused noise and chemical pollution.

With that history and the ongoing stress we cause them, how do Humpback whales respond to us?

With caring and benign interaction.

Recently, Nan Hauser, a marine biologist in the Pacific Ocean's Cook Islands, described a Humpback whale pushing her away from a Tiger Shark. A Humpback could of course kill a person with a tiny flick of its tail. But like most whales around humans, this Humpback was gentle, even putting its fin over the diver in a protective way.

The video doesn't show the shark. But it does show how a monstrous whale came in contact with a diver and took great care to be gentle with the human.

Check it out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YZYQT8bvS8

Throckmorton, The African Grey Parrot

Here is one more great story from Ackerman's The Genius Of Birds.

If you get the paperpack version, turn to page 146 and prepare to laugh and be amazed. Ackerman recounts the story of Throckmorton, an African Grey Parrot whose verbal ability is astonishing.

Throckmorton belongs to a couple, Karen and Bob, and his housemate is a miniature schnauzer. 

Throckmorton perfectly mimics the ring tone of Bob's cell phone. Then he mimics Bob answering it, "Hello? Uh huh, uh huh, uh huh." Then Throckmorton mimics the sound of Bob hanging up. From the other room, Karen thinks (knows) that Bob is in the next room and has been talking on the phone. 

Throckmorton's cell phone fluency is a great way to entertain himself, getting Bob and Karen both running, looking for their phones.

When Throckmorton wants some action, he mimics the schnauzer barking as if someone has knocked on the door. The schnauzer then joins, wondering, no doubt, how he missed the door knocker. No one, including Bob and Karen, can tell the difference between the parrot barking and the dog barking. Karen says that Throckmorton makes their house sound like a kennel.

When Bob has a cold, Throckmorton does his nose-blowing, coughing, and sneezing routine, exactly like Bob. Throckmorton mimics the sound of Bob slurping his coffee. He can do a perfect rendition of Karen gulping water.

And of course, Throckmorton has a comprehensive command of English, including those colorful words that can make certain dinner guests uncomfortable.

Further, he perfectly mimics both Karen's and Bob's voices. So if he wants someone to come, he calls out, "Bob" in Karen's voice, or "Karen" in Bob's voice. 

Never a dull moment in Throckmorton's house!

I highly recommend Ackerman's book.

Is GPS Making Us Dumber?

Last week, I wrote about Jennifer Ackerman's "The Genius Of Birds," an amazing collection of the latest science on bird intelligence. One of the studies was looking into similarities between the way birds learn to navigate and the way humans learn to navigate.

Birds learn how to navigate by watching their parents and communicating with other birds and flying around learning where places are and by figuring out through experience how to accurately go back to those places. It turns out that if you raise a bird without this experience, the bird, no matter how innately smart, does not learn navigation skills.

Humans are the same way.

The conclusion of the science was something that society has begun to witness anecdotally. When people spend time studying maps and putting the information in them to use (such as driving cross country, or engaging in the sport of orienteering, or finding one's way in the canoe wilderness of Northern Minnesota and Ontario using nothing but a topographical map and a compass) people get very good at navigation skills. Drop a person with such experience into the wilderness at night with nothing but the sun and the stars for information, and they will have a good chance of finding their way out.

By contrast, if a person goes everywhere by listening to the synthetic voice in the car give directions, saying "Turn right in one mile, then turn left at the next intersection," the person never really gets a sense of where anything is in relation to other places. The person never learns geography. Drop that person into the wilderness, they are helpless.

The two people may have equal intelligence, but the one who figures out where they're going is dramatically smarter than the one who just follows directions.

The Genius Of Birds

We all love birds. Of all the non-human animals on the planet, they are the only ones who are everywhere, all the time, tropics or arctic, and they flaunt their brain power as well as their beauty. Other animals, from meek mice to roaring lions, tend lie low or even hide, whether to avoid being eaten or to avoid scaring off their lunch.

Not birds. They are loud and in your face. They are bold. And they are amazing problem solvers, displaying a brilliance and a group of skills that no other animals possess.

I just finished reading a great book titled The Genius Of Birds by Jennifer Ackerman. I always knew birds were special. Ms. Ackerman explained why and how.

We often notice the smarts of our dogs. We notice the smarts of dolphins and elephants and apes. These animals can all do amazing things with memory (finding buried toys or food), searching (dogs and dolphins using scent to find and track explosives), communication (dolphins give each other names), making tools to get food (chimps make hunting spears), complex social interactions (elephants mourn their dead with specific rituals).

But birds are the only animals who do all of the above plus can learn to mimic other animal communication with astonishing fidelity, use tools to make other tools, build impressive homes using many kinds of materials, make dramatic, colorful art installations that have no functional purpose and are only designed to attract mates, and keep track of the calendar to the day. For example, Hummingbirds can memorize the location of thousands of flower/nectar food sources and the dates those flowers typically bloom. Then they show up each year on the same day after migrating hundreds or even thousands of miles.

One of their most amazing abilities is their navigation ability. Birds create a mental, geographic map of their world that includes vision, hearing, smell, and even magnetic field information. They are of course born with the right wiring. But it is their learning through observation of their parents and trial and error that gives them these skills.

In a notable experiment, scientists in Seattle trapped birds that have lived their entire lives on the West Coast. They attached tiny transmitters to the birds, then put those birds into a closed metal container (comfortable inside for the birds). The container allowed no information, light or sound or magnetism, from the outer world to seep in. Then, using a circuitous route, the scientists took the birds to the East Coast, 3000 miles from anyplace they'd ever been, and released them. The birds flew around a bit as if to do a little reconnaissance about their new area. After a day or so, the birds headed west. In a few days, the birds all returned home.

While many birds are born with certain innate understanding. Scientists have learned, and demonstrated, that most critical bird navigation is learned. And if you take away that learning, birds cannot navigate well at all.

Next week, I'll discuss the question of what that means for people relying on GPS to give them directions to their destination. Hint: It ain't good!

Apparently, Dogs Pass The Mirror Self-Recognition Test After All, As Long As It's A Smell-Based Mirror

The "Mirror Test" is a well-known way to show which animals have self-awareness and self-recognition. The basic idea is that you take an animal - say, an elephant - and, without them knowing, put a dab of red paint on their forehead. Then have the animal look at itself in a mirror. If they see the red paint and immediately focus on the red paint and maybe reach up with their trunk to touch it, then you know that they have an understanding of "self." i.e., "That guy in the mirror is me and why the heck is there red paint on my face?"

Elephants and dolphins and gorillas and chimps and bonobos and orangutans have this understanding of "self."

But dogs do not. At least, not in the conventional way. Put something outlandish on a dog's face and have him look in the mirror, he will be indifferent. A dog clearly does not realize that the image in a mirror is "him."

Except maybe we've got it all wrong.

A mirror is a visual device. Dogs are olfactory oriented. The major part of their world is perceived with their sense of smell.

So what if we could create a olfactory mirror?

I recently started reading "Being A Dog: Following the Dog into a World of Smell" by Alexandra Horowitz. (She also wrote "Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know." )

In this book, she quickly asks this obvious question, suggesting that we foolishly judge dogs in a visual way, when they are mostly focused on the sense of smell.

So she and her colleagues devised a "mirror" that was smell-based instead of vision-based.

The basic idea was to use dog urine as a way to judge how a dog perceived itself as opposed to other dogs. The reason is that urine is one of the richest sources of information available to a dog. (Yes, your urine, too!) A sniff of urine can tell a dog an astonishing amount of information about whoever left it. What kind of animal, the sex of the animal, how long ago the animal left the urine, whether the animal was stressed or fearful or happy, whether the animal was pregnant or sick or hungry or... The list is endless.

And one of the basic ways a dog interacts with its environment is to add a bit of its own urine to the environment. When urine is added to previous urine, that previous urine is considered "marked" by the new additional urine. The result is that there are, very broadly, three categories of urine out there when viewed from the point of view of a dog. Urine that belongs exclusively to a particular dog. Urine that has been "marked" (added to) by another dog. And, third, any combination of urine that contains urine from the dog who is investigating.

In other words, the researchers wanted to know if a dog can recognize its own urine. And if so, could it recognize and be aware of when its own urine is marked by another dog, i.e., a form of looking into a mirror and discovering red paint on its face?

So the researchers collected urine from a wide range of dogs. They also collected urine that had been added to ("marked") by other dogs. Then, with careful controls, they allowed the dogs to "discover" the different urine combinations.

What happened?

There were three main reactions.

1) When a dog sniffed its own urine, it was not interested at all.
2) When a dog sniffed another dog's urine, it was quite interested and spent a lot of time investigating.
(These first two concepts say a great deal about self-awareness. But read on...)
3) When a dog sniffed its own urine that had been "marked" (added to) by another dog's urine, the dog found it very interesting. (Red paint on your forehead.)

The scientists were, of course, quite careful in their controls. Scientists always take great pains to not jump to false conclusions.

Nevertheless, the experiment seems very much like it demonstrates self-awareness on the part of dogs.

No doubt, more research will be coming. But it looks like dogs do pass the mirror test as long as the test is based on smell instead of vision.