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VISIT the Australian National Botanic Gardens in Canberra and you may stumble upon an odd sight: a human figure, festooned with futuristic monitoring gear. When children poke it 鈥� which happens a lot 鈥� the statue blinks.
Meet Jessica McLachlan, a researcher at Australian National University who is hard at work studying the fine, never-before-detected details of bird behaviour. The gear she wears is what it takes to observe the world as birds themselves see it.
Bird brains are miracles of miniaturisation. Their neurons are smaller and more densely packed than ours, and differ architecturally too, creating a network of close connections. As a result, bird brains operate more quickly than ours.
This means that in the bird world, things happen fast 鈥� sometimes too fast for us to see. Unless you film blue-capped cordon-bleus at 300 frames per second, for example, you will miss that they tap dance in time with their singing.
Science and nature writer Jennifer Ackerman鈥檚 The Bird Way: A new look at how birds talk, work, play, parent and think is a fresh account of the world of birds, written to showcase the many marvels revealed by modern tracking and recording techniques. Such wonders were previously quite invisible to us. For example, by strapping tiny tracking backpacks to seabirds, we have discovered that they have a quite extraordinary sense of smell, following krill across apparently featureless horizons that are, for them, 鈥渆laborate landscapes of eddying odor plumes鈥�.
Ackerman has travelled far and talked to many, and is generous to a fault with her academic sources. Her descriptions of her visits, field trips and adventures are engaging, but never obtrusive.
鈥淒rongos mimic up to 45 alarm calls to frighten other species into dropping their lunch鈥�
The book centres primarily on the bird life of Australia. This is, after all, where songbirds evolved, as did parrots and pigeons. Like every ornithological writer before her, Ackerman is besotted by the sheer variety of her subjects.
One of the most endearing passages in the book compares parrot and corvid species. Both groups are intelligent and highly social. Yet after 92 million years of evolutionary separation, the similarities stop there.
Ravens, which are corvids, are frightened of novelty. Keas, a type of parrot, lap it up. When faced with a new researcher, keas will abandon a task to go play with the stranger. Ravens will simply wig out. They also have a strict feeding hierarchy, while curious male keas will stuff food down an unfamiliar youngster鈥檚 gullet until it is fending them off.
Ackerman鈥檚 account is often jaw-dropping, and never more shocking than when she assembles the evidence for the cultural sophistication of birdsong. Birds decode far more from sounds than we do, and until recently, their acoustic complexity had gone unheard.
Japanese tits, for instance, use 11 different notes in their songs, and it is the combination of notes that encodes information. Swap two notes around, and you elicit different responses. If this isn鈥檛 quite syntax, it is something very like it. The drongo has absolute control over its song, using up to 45 mimicked alarm calls to frighten other species, such as meerkats, into dropping their lunch 鈥� and it will target specific warning calls at individuals so they don鈥檛 twig what is going on.
Meanwhile, many different species of bird worldwide, from Australia to the Himalayas, appear to have developed a universal signal to warn of the approach of brood parasites (cuckoos and the like).
If the 20th century was the golden age of laboratory study, the 21st is shaping up to become a renaissance for the sorts of field studies Charles Darwin would recognise. Now that cybernetically enhanced researchers like McLachlan can follow individuals, we have a chance to gauge and understand their intelligence. Intelligence is, after all, really hard to spot. It doesn鈥檛 suit tabulation or statistical analysis. Intelligent behaviour is unusual. It is novel. It takes a long time to see.
If birds are as intelligent as so many of Ackerman鈥檚 stories suggest, though, then this may only be the start of our problems. In Sweden, for example, corvid researchers Mathias and Helena Osvath have befriended a raven who turns up for their experiments, aces them, then flaps off again. 鈥淚n the ethics section of grant applications,鈥� says Matthias, 鈥渋t鈥檚 difficult to explain.鈥�
