The Thing with Feathers (30 page)

How did those routines develop? Nobody really knows. Darwinian natural selection can often explain why different creatures are well adapted to their respective environments—why, say, an albatross grew such long wings in the windiest places on earth—but what about true love? Emotions don’t leave fossils, so we have less hard evidence of their history.

In its usual human sense, romantic love may just be one more survival mechanism to benefit its practitioners—just like the albatross’s wing. The strong bonds created by love affairs help us procreate our species. If we didn’t fall in love, we wouldn’t be as motivated to stick together while raising our children. Human kids take decades of supervision, food, guidance, tuition, and general support. The more help they receive from both parents, the better. If you want to take a purely mechanistic view of love, then it makes sense in terms of survival.

If love has evolved just like any physical characteristic, then there is no reason for it to be uniquely human. All of the same pressures that have acted on us to love each other—long life expectancy, high investment in our children, the necessity of both parents to provide for their kids—have also acted on albatrosses. We’re not so different in our basic needs and functions.

—

IN A FAR CORNER
of the West Point colony, I noticed a pair of black-browed albatrosses taking a quiet time out in the midst of all the chaos, seemingly lost in each other’s presence. One sat squarely on their nest as a tiny chick’s head poked out from beneath its downy breast feathers—flat-out asleep, evidently snoozing after a full meal. The bird’s mate snuggled alongside so that their heads rested softly against each other. When one breathed, the other moved slightly. Both had their eyes half closed, completely relaxed. They gave the impression of a pair of lovers leaning against each other on a park bench, gazing into an ocean sunset, mere pinpricks in the folds of our universe, but safe, secure, and content with their place in it. For the moment, nothing else mattered.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In November 2011, I received a four-sentence e-mail that would change my life. It was from Laura Perciasepe, an editor at Riverhead Books. “I’m looking for a writer for a book on birds,” she wrote, and thus this project was born. Laura shared her idea for an entertaining book about bird behavior, and then, amazingly, she relinquished control, allowing me to run with the concept over the next year as she cheered, inspired, and applied her deft editing talents. I am completely indebted to her vision, trust, and willingness, when considering possible writers, to call on a twenty-six-year-old bird nerd thousands of miles from Riverhead’s editorial offices in New York, and I am deeply grateful to Laura for her unfailing support and encouragement throughout this project. My thanks to everyone else at Riverhead Books, including Geoff Kloske, Kate Stark, Jynne Martin, Katie Freeman, and their teams. A special thanks to Helen Yentus and Janet Hansen for the jacket design. Thank you also to copy editor Amy Brosey, copy chief Linda Rosenberg, managing editor Lisa D’Agostino, production manager John Sharp, interior designer Nicole LaRoche, and all the design and production staff who turned my efforts into this beautiful book. I am likewise indebted to my agent, Russell Galen, of the Scovil Galen Ghosh Literary Agency, who, when I hesitantly contacted him about representing my work, replied, “I’ve been following you from afar since you were around twelve . . . it’s destiny.” If our connection was written in the stars, it’s now
also written in a book. I could not have asked for a more professional, accessible, colorful, and effective agent. This book also greatly benefited from insightful, well-informed, and detailed critiques by two luminaries of the American Birding Association: Ted Floyd,
Birding
magazine editor, and Paul Hess,
Birding
“News and Notes” department editor. Ted and Paul generously reviewed early manuscripts, sometimes on short notice, and their rare combination of ornithological and literary expertise added substantially to this work.

This volume reflects the research of many brilliant scientists, some of whom have employed me in field studies around the world over the past decade. Ornithologists may be a strange lot, but they know about living to the fullest—often in the most remote, spectacular, and adventurous corners of this planet—and these hardcore scientists have taught me about much more than birds. I appreciate all that I have received from those who came before me.

Finally, I am thankful for my parents, whose love and support have helped me follow my own birdy path, and who have embraced the fact that family vacations now inevitably turn into birding holidays. Not all parents can critique a page with the sharp eye of a journalist, argue about bowerbird art over dinner, then bake the best chocolate chip cookies in the world. So thanks, Mom and Dad, for the cookies and for the world.

NOTES AND SOURCES

A world of literature is distilled in this book. Each chapter could easily expand into a volume of its own—and many of them already have been. I don’t pretend to cover these subjects exhaustively, but I offer a taste and synthesis of available research to show how cool, interesting, and thought-provoking the world of birds can be. While some of the themes presented are my own interpretations (for instance, that albatrosses can feel love) based on my personal field experiences with birds, the facts are facts. Major sources are listed below in order of appearance within each chapter. Even this is an abbreviated account; instead of including every reference, I have highlighted the most interesting studies and the scientists behind them, pointing the way for anyone interested in further reading.

FLY AWAY HOME

I tracked down the lost racing pigeon’s owner, Marty, by looking up its band digits on the American Racing Pigeon Union website (if you ever find a lost pigeon with bands, report it—its owner will thank you!), and interviewed him by phone in the spring of 2012. The subject of bird navigation is huge, and whole books have been written about how birds find their way—for instance, Miyoko Chu’s well-researched
Songbird Journeys
(2007) and Scott Weidensaul’s excellent exposition of migration,
Living on the Wind
(2000)—so this chapter only hits the highlights of homing behavior. Rosario Mazzeo reported the results of his shearwater experiment in the 1953 article “Homing of the Manx Shearwater.” At least three books have been written about Bobbie the Wonder Dog. Ninja was featured on an episode of
Nature
originally aired on PBS in 1999. Yosemite black bear management protocols were outlined in a 1997 California Fish and Game document. Smallmouth black bass homing experiments were described by R. W. Larimore in 1952. Homing behavior of garden snails was described in the 2010 BBC Radio 4 “So You Want to Be a Scientist” winning project, by sixty-nine-year-old grandmother Ruth Brooks, reported by
The Telegraph
. The white-crowned sparrow homing experiments were conducted by Richard Mewaldt in the 1960s and 1970s. Rupert Sheldrake’s article “The Unexplained Powers of Animals” was printed in
New Renaissance
in 2003. Andrew Blechman gives a thorough account of pigeon racing history (and other pigeon stories) in his 2007 book,
Pigeons: The Fascinating Saga of the World’s Most Revered and Reviled Bird
. Hans Wallraff, who conducted the tilting turntable experiment, reports on the map and compass in his 2005 book,
Avian Navigation: Pigeon Homing as a Paradigm
. Pigeons were tracked following roads by global-positioning-system technology in a 2004 Oxford University study by Tim Guilford and colleagues. The “sun compass” was discovered by Gustav Kramer in his 1951 starling experiments. Stephen Emlen conducted the planetarium tests with indigo buntings in 1967. Mel Kreithen was the first to demonstrate that pigeons can hear infrasound; he investigated their perception of polarized light and pioneered many studies of pigeon navigation. A neural basis for magnetic perception in pigeons was described in a 2012
Science
article by Le-Qing Wu and J. David Dickman. Katrin Stapput performed the robin experiments showing the right eye’s sensitivity to magnetic fields, in 2010. Floriano Papi first proposed an “olfactory map” for pigeons in 1972; olfaction continues to be debated as it relates to navigation. Martin Wikelski published the right-nostril research in 2011. Jon Hagstrum correlated pigeon disappearances with infrasound in 2013. Coverage of the Birdmuda Triangle hit major media in August 2012 after racing pigeon disappearances in northeast England. Airborne pigeon hierarchies were described in a 2010
Nature
paper. The South African Million Dollar Pigeon Race was moved to the Emperors Palace in 2013 after sixteen years at the Sun City Resort in northern South Africa.

SPONTANEOUS ORDER

If you haven’t seen the starling flock video, type “murmuration” into YouTube and be amazed. Richard Barnes has exhibited solo shows of his starling photos (titled
Murmur
) in Seattle, Boston, and New York galleries; Jonathan Rosen wrote the 2008 book
The Life of the Skies
. Jeffrey Goldstein is a professor at Adelphi University, specializing in complexity, emergence, and organizational behavior. Steven Johnson’s
Emergence
was published in 2002. Peter Corning’s 2002 paper was titled “The Re-emergence of ‘Emergence’: A Venerable Concept in Search of a Theory.” John Conway’s Game of Life has spun into an entire field of mathematical research on cellular automata—grids of cells that change by set rules—that continues to yield fascinating insights into physics, biology, and other fields. Craig Reynolds posted a mesmerizing demonstration of his Boids model at red3d.com/cwr/boids (accessed March 2013), worth a peek as it closely mimics the real-life YouTube “Murmuration” video. Predicting the path of celestial bodies in one another’s gravitational fields, given only present velocities and directions, is called the “n-body problem,” which, so far, has not been solved exactly for more than two objects. The Italian researchers’ starling flock model was described in “Empirical Investigation of Starling Flocks: A Benchmark Study in Collective Animal Behavior” (Michele Ballerini et al.), and the topological distance conclusion was reported in “Interaction Ruling Animal Collective Behavior Depends on Topological Rather Than Metric Distance: Evidence from a Field Study” (Michele Ballerini et al.), both papers from 2008. The Shakespeare story is omnipresent in popular accounts of starling introductions, but I know of no accurate primary source. Albert’s swarm of locusts, however, is not an exaggerated tale; it was conservatively estimated from qualitative measurements to be a single stream of insects 1,800 miles long, 110 miles wide, and one-quarter to one-half mile deep (!), representing the largest single concentration of animals ever recorded (as described in Jeffrey Lockwood’s 2005 book,
Locust
). Starling declines were reported by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds in 2012. Andrea Cavagna et al.’s 2010 paper “Scale-free Correlations in Starling Flocks”
describes the implications of flock correlation lengths, and flocks are discussed in terms of spontaneous magnetization in a 2012 paper, “Statistical Mechanics for Natural Flocks of Birds.” George Miller’s paper “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits of Our Capacity for Processing Information” was originally published in 1956. Andrea Cavagna kindly answered several of my questions by e-mail.

THE BUZZARD’S NOSTRIL

Anecdotes are from my experience attracting turkey vultures to my yard with a deer carcass in June 2000 (inspired by the “Meat-Eaters” episode of David Attenborough’s 1998 series
The Life of Birds
). John James Audubon’s original account of his vulture experiments was published in 1826 in
The Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal
. Among subsequent rebuttals were three articles by Charles Waterton (1832–1833) in
The Magazine of Natural History
. Darwin’s
The Voyage of the Beagle
was first released in 1839 as
Journal and Remarks
. John Bachman’s vulture studies were published in a sixteen-page pamphlet (1834) under the title “An Account of Some Experiments Made on the Habits of the Vultures Inhabiting Carolina, the Turkey Buzzard, and the Carrion Crow, Particularly As It Regards the Extraordinary Powers of Smelling, Usually Attributed to Them” (1834). Taxonomy of New World vultures is controversial: Many have argued that they are related to storks (for instance, Charles G. Sibley and Burt L. Monroe, Jr., in 1990), some believe they form their own order, and a recent DNA analysis (Shannon Hackett et al., in
Science
, 2008) suggests that New World vultures are related to raptors. Vulture digestion was described in an engaging 2008
Audubon
magazine article by T. Edward Nickens. Kenneth Stager included an account of Union Oil workers’ stories about turkey vultures with descriptions of his own experiments in his 1964 monograph “The Role of Olfaction in Food Location by the Turkey Vulture (
Cathartes aura
).” The Panama chicken carcass experiment was performed by David Houston and published in 1986. Lab tests of turkey vulture sensitivity to different odors are described by Steven A. Smith and Richard A. Paselk in a 1986 paper titled “Olfactory Sensitivity of the Turkey Vulture (
Cathartes aura
) to Three Carrion-Associated Odorants.” Information about avian taste buds is given in Frank Gill’s
Ornithology
textbook (2007 edition).