As the subtitle says, it's a book at intelligence of birds. The different forms of intelligence, the ways researchers have tried to assess whether birds possess it, the ways their brains work.
Emery tends to spend a couple of pages at a time within a chapter on different aspects, or on those tests. Chapter 2, for example, is on navigation, which is a broad topic, and can be handled by different species in different ways. Emery might spend a few pages on long-distance migrations, discussing the different methods birds use, and what adaptations they've developed for the purpose.
I knew that birds could sense magnetic fields and navigate by those, although there's apparently competing theories about how they do so. I didn't know that some birds can apparently navigate by stars, although it seems to be based on which stars are visible, rather than using Polaris. If they see stars associated with the Southern Hemisphere (or perhaps just a more southerly latitude), they fly north, and vice versa.
From there, however, Emery might move to discussing the role of memory in getting food. Whether that's a hummingbird keeping track of which flowers it visited recently, so that it doesn't come back before there's more nectar, or what clues birds use to remember where they cached food and studies that were done to determine this. Then he might segue into the role the hippocampus plays in this.
The book is written in a general manner, though. Emery doesn't go into long table of figures or statistical analyses. He tends more towards quick summaries, which figures or diagrams to illustrate the point. Usually one page has text and the facing page has the visuals of what's being discussed, or just a nice picture of birds of a landscape the birds he's discussing inhabit. There is a listing of studies referenced, along with options for further reading (both of which include papers Emery was part of ) at the end, so if the reader found the curiosity piqued by a particular part, they could track down something more in-depth.
'In a classic study, two populations of blackcaps migrated in different directions; one northern European population flew southwest to winter initially in southern Spain, before moving on to equatorial Africa, whereas the other eastern European population migrated southeast toward Turkey and eventually East Africa. When birds from each population were allowed to breed, their offspring contained genes from both populations and flew due south between the migratory routes of their parents.'
4 comments:
The seagulls around here (we have a lot of seagulls, to the extent that our local football team is named after them) do this thing where they rapidly tap the ground with their feet to trick earthworms into coming to the surface to be eaten, because they think the tapping is rainfall.
That's always struck me as clever, and I'm not aware that seagulls are particularly intelligent as birds go.
There are robins and such that do the same thing around here. Emery doesn't discuss that behavior in the book, but it seems like the sort of thing he would. There's a lot of talk about learned behavior versus inherited, versus intuition, and I don't know which "make worms think it's raining," falls under.
At some point in the past, some bird or bird ancestor must have figured that out somehow. Did they pass it on until it became ingrained or does each generation teach the next, or what?
He also goes into the notion that we tend to define intelligence too narrowly and assume certain species are dumb based on our criteria. he uses pigeons, even though they're pretty great navigators, but gulls would likely qualify as well.
Yeah, that's the question that I have too: it doesn't feel like that could be instinct, because it's so situational and specific. So do the seagulls pass it on to their children? If so, how?
Emery talks about how canaries learn song by hearing one, then spending time memorizing without vocalizing, then actually trying it out until they get it so it matches what they internalized. So I figure it might be something like that, where the young observe their parents' actions, then imitate and hone the skill. Like, they probably tap their bill on concrete and don't understand why no food crawls out a few times, then gradually watch and learn and figure out they need to find dirt.
I know there's quite a bit of work with young animals having to develop a search image of what they're supposed to eat when they first start foraging, and that usually involves mimicking their parents, with a lot of trial-and-error.
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