January 23, 2005
Reading science: Corvids, anatids, and me
If you do a lot of reading, as I do, of humanities texts, there comes a point when you need a reorientation of your brain proclivities. It's like a particularly invigorating form of exercise, a mountain bike ride in the country after eons of roughing it in a desk chair.
Melville's Ishmael said he knew it was time to hit the high seas when he found himself bringing up the rear of every passing funeral. I don't have any trigger moments like that, at least not that I'm consciously aware of, but there comes a moment when even the finance journalism I work with daily doesn't quite do the mind-cleaning trick, and I find myself hunting for something else.
  (Photos by Greg Stepanich)  Hear the ducks |
For me, that something else is science. I don't have a deep background in science, though I did enjoy a human physiology course and concomitant studies in primatology at the University of Illinois. I've subscribed on and off to Scientific American (www.sciam.com) for years, too, and I've got a couple dozen volumes of science books at the house, mostly on biology topics.
So you can't call me particularly well-read in science, but you can call me an occasional enthusiast.
Having animals in the house is an encouragement of this enthusiasm, as pet owners know well. Trying to figure out the thought processes of our cat Pumpkin is always interesting, even if the conclusions are sometimes alarming, i.e., that she isn't exactly at the head of her furry feline class.
Our pet white Pekin duck, who literally weathered Hurricanes Frances and Jeanne outdoors with avian aplomb, makes Pumpkin look like a blazing genius in comparison. And the same goes for the flock of geese and ducks I feed each morning on my walk through the neighborhood before work. They do see me coming, and raise the food alarm, and pad rapidly and webbily over to me from the banks of the pond where they sit like feathered house plants much of the day.
Still, it's hard to have a real conversation with them.
Spoken, as I well know, like a true anthropomorphic snob. Critter smarts can't be assessed like they are for humans. Writer Bob Tarte, whose funny, charming book about his many pets, Enslaved by Ducks (enslavedbyducks.com), talks about looking into the eyes of his animals and feeling the presence of what he called "packets of alien intelligence."
And he's right. Animals have their own universe, their own rules. Schopenhauer, who was something of an early animal-rights activist, said animals were the embodiment of the present tense, and this is a beautiful way of looking at our fellow creatures. They just are what they are, without apology.
But now comes a report in the Dec. 10 edition of Science (www.sciencemag.org) by two researchers at the University of Cambridge in England that suggests members of the crow family (crows, jays, ravens, magpies, jackdaws) "are not only superior in intelligence to birds of other avian species (perhaps with the exception of some parrots), but also rival many nonhuman primates."
Nathan J. Emery and Nicola S. Clayton go on to say that a corvid brain is much larger than you would expect for small birds, and is "relatively the same size as the chimpanzee brain." Further, the forebrain, where plenty of thinking in mammal brains takes place, is much larger in corvids than it is in other birds.
Emery and Clayton argue that corvids actually reason about their worlds, like apes do. They build standardized tools, hide food for later and fake out potential pilferers with phony food caches, and most importantly, apply what they've learned to other situations. "The ability to solve transfer problems by abstracting general rules is what distinguishes rule learners from rote learners," like pigeons, the scientists write.
Gulp. So Alfred Hitchcock was on to something.
Now we know why the blue jays in our backyard always seem to be the advance guard for a winged food raid. It's because you want the strategists to size up the situation before bringing everyone else in. "All clear! Cue the cardinals!"
Emery and Clayton suggest that corvids and apes developed complex cognition, despite the wide differences in their species, in response to similar social and ecological pressures. This reminds me of something I read a while back about Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution. Darwin, the writer said, wasn't quite aware of just how powerful his theory was, and that evolution was an extraordinary process that worked both faster and more broadly than he realized.
Not only is intelligence a quality with many definitions, but intelligence that resembles something we primatoids would recognize appears to be present in the creatures of the air. If that doesn't get your mammalian cortex humming with other ideas, I don't know what will.
So bless the beasts and the children — and don't assume they live in separate houses.
Back to the music: One guilty pleasure of writing reviews for a newspaper that's part of a larger news service is that you can use various search engines to see whether other papers have picked up your stuff. It's appallingly self-centered, but it's an itch I love to scratch.
Besides, it's introduced me to some good classical-music Websites I didn't know about:
Sequenza21 (www.sequenza21.com): A terrific New York-based site, run by Jerry Bowles, who posts daily bloggish news entries. Lists of resources, links to composer/performer blogs.
La scène musicale (www.scena.org): Montreal-based site run by La Scène Musicale/The Musical Scene, available in French and English. News links, reviews, a Canadian classical music calendar and a weekly column by British music gadfly Norman Lebrecht.
Netnewmusic (www.netnewmusic.net): Jeff Harrington runs this portal focused on contemporary classical and avant-garde music. Links to composer/performer sites devoted to living artists, concert announcements and notes, commentary, and a link to beepSNORT (www.beepSNORT.org), an electronic music site.
Andante (www.andante.com): This "everything classical" site features an online magazine, a boutique for CD purchases, and Andante Radio, an all-classical online station for site members.
In other news: The Associated Press reports that Elvis Costello is writing an opera for the Danish Royal Theatre based on Hans Christian Andersen's unrequited love for Jenny Lind, the Swedish Nightingale, who was among the most popular sopranos in history (Walt Whitman was a big fan, too).
As I've said before, there might be something more to this Elvis does classical thing than at first meets the eye and ear.
Bob:
Funny story about Timmy. Thanks for sharing it.
Ducky really is riveted by the activities of the dogs next door. Once he got out of the backyard, and we had to lure him back in by using one of the dogs as bait.
Sharon says as soon as that dog came out of the yard, Ducky was all over him, grabbing his tail and generally just pestering him. Fortunately for Ducky, that dog was good-natured and apparently was more perplexed than anything else by this crazy bird's behavior.
It got him into trouble, too. He used to shove his bill underneath the chain-link fence at one of the other dogs, which would bark and bark as Ducky squawked and squawked. But at some point, Ducky had his mouth open at just the wrong time and got a piece of his bill chomped off.
The vet told us it would take a week or so to heal, and it was in all truth a pretty miserable week for him and us. But he's fine now, he's learned to use his tongue so that the food doesn't fly out of his mouth, and we've run a big roll of chicken wire, aka "poultry mesh," along the bottom of the fence to keep dog and duck at a safe distance.
Kind of an unpleasant story; we're told by other duck people that Pekins get into scrapes like this all the time. One told us she had a yard full of them, half of them with partial bills.
In any case, Ducky likes the dogs, but he's a solitary duck otherwise, and I think he's going to need a billed companion before long. He might be happier that way.
All best to you and yours, and thanks again for writing.
Greg
Posted by: Greg at January 25, 2005 11:01 PMHi, Greg,
It always amazed me how quickly ducks and other animals learn our routines. We had to sequester our duck Timmy in his own room in the barn overnight because he was getting too aggressive with the females. At first, it was difficult shooing him into the back room, and I felt bad about it. But after the spring-early summer mating season wound down and his testosterone levels dropped, it wasn't necessary to separate him from the females. But now he heads for the room on his own when I close up the barn each evening, and I do believe he would feel slighted if I changed the procedure!
Thanks for the congratulations on the option, which we are just now finalizing. Linda and I have no idea if anything will come of it, but it is lots of fun to consider and if nothing else should help book sales. By the way, I'm working on a follow-up to "Ducks" called "Fowl Weather."
Take care.
- Bob Tarte, Author of "Enslaved By Ducks"
Posted by: Bob Tarte at January 25, 2005 11:19 AMBob:
Nice to hear from you.
I felt kind of bad after I wrote that about Ducky; I was going for a laugh and probably shouldn't have.
Just being himself, Ducky is wonderful to watch. He's perfectly designed for what he does, using that bill and that long neck for all kinds of things. It's absorbing just to watch him groom, and fun to watch him quack maniacally through the fence at the dogs next door.
And he's had some more traditional "thinking" responses. When he first wandered into our lives three years ago, he got used quickly to when feeding time was. Once, my wife Sharon was late with his food, and was heading toward the backyard to get him fed when she found that he was already at the door, banging on it with his bill. We've never been late with his feed again.
By the way, congratulations on the paperback of the book, and the Patricia Heaton movie option.
-- Greg
Posted by: Greg at January 24, 2005 7:46 PMHi, Greg,
Thanks so much for the nice mention of my book, "Enslaved By Ducks." It's always tempting to sell ducks short in the intelligence department, but on their own terms they succeed quite admirably. I should add that not all waterfowl are created equal. Our gander Matthew learned to come into the barn when I called his name within about 10 days, and he did not respond to other names. And our Muscovy duck Victor is unique in understanding that sometimes when I walk toward him after passing out a treat, I do this not to chase him but to protect him from interlopers. Our White Pekin, in contrast, considers my advance to be a threat simply because I tower over him. And in the bird world, bigger usually means dominance. Don't try and tell that to my wife's African grey parrot Dusty, though. He once walked all the way upstairs just to chomp my ankle.
- Bob Tarte, Author of "Enslaved By Ducks"
Posted by: Bob Tarte at January 24, 2005 11:48 AM
