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CHAPTER 1
THE FRIENDLY BIRD
Do you ever wonder what birds are talking about as they fly by? The sounds and songs of birds constantly surround us as we go about our lives. But what are they talking about? Or are they even talking or just mindlessly squawking and chirping? Is there a message in what the birds are telling each other? Compared to European cities, birds in our urban areas are much bigger and louder in their vocalisation. One of my personal favourite calls happens between bonded magpie larks. When you hear one call, you always hear its mate answer. Why are birds so loud? A possible reason could be birds have more to talk about in Australia and there are more individuals who are motivated to listen.
When compared to the rest of the world, Australia has a high number of birds living in groups made up of individuals. These group members work together to survive in a country with unpredictable food and water. Just like us, the lives of birds such as parrots, cockatoos, honeyeaters, crows, ravens and magpies are filled with social interactions. And, just like us, they need to communicate with each other: to let one another know what they are thinking.
The white settlers' fascination with Australian birds began very early on. In 1788 naval officer and surgeon Dr Arthur Bowers Smyth, on board The Lady Penrhyn, reported in his journal that: 'The singing of various birds among the trees, and the flight of the numerous parraquets, lorrequets, cockatoos and macaws made all around appear like an enchantment.' In 1837 Charles Darwin and birdman John Gould had a conversation about this:
'You're not alone in your fascination. These birds do exercise a strange power over us,' said Darwin. 'Were you aware that when New South Wales was colonised, convict, surgeon, redcoat — no matter what class — all shared a passion for the penal settlement's birdlife?'
'Everyone, it appeared, was in a rush to pick up a pencil and capture the bright creatures flitting about,' John Gould replied. 'I'm not surprised by the colonials' interest in their unique birdlife. Who could resist such distracting beauties?'
Like us, many Australian birds are highly social creatures, living in cooperative societies with others. We share similar life trajectories to corvids, parrots and artamidae families (such as magpies, butcherbirds, currawongs) in terms of having a relatively long childhood before gaining independence and living long lives. We don't start our own families until later in life, instead putting learning and survival above having babies early. This seems to be a common trait in Australian birds compared to European birds, who breed earlier and have shorter lifespans.
Breeding age can, however, vary with birds. Budgies, for example, can breed at three months, while satin bowerbirds wait until they are seven years old. But just because a bird can breed doesn't mean it will. Among superb fairy-wrens, for example, a study found that lack of available territory and/or willing females often means that the male remains a bachelor for years.
In order to live in harmony with others in your group, you must be able to change your behaviour and even learn from another individual — this is a show of behavioural flexibility. In science, this ability has long been viewed as an indicator of intelligence. For example, research has found that birds can learn to manufacture and use tools to solve problems insightfully and even plan for future needs. This shows birds are capable of using their own experience to anticipate the future behaviour of others, including humans.
We share similar characteristics with birds such as vocal learning, and we have individuals in our lives with whom we interact at different times and share information with them. These characteristics, while uncommon in most primates, are found in birds including parrots/cockatoos, corvids and the artamidae family. Understanding how birds form and maintain relationships in complex social groups can aid our understanding of social behaviour in these cognitively complex species.
In this book we will explore the different relationships birds have with each other, and how they convey their messages. A bird has relationships of different status, from neighbours to life-partners and offspring. It needs to convey different messages to each of them. Duetting, for example, is used to help reaffirm bonds between individuals, playing an important role in the vocal communication system of birds. Duetting is a specific form of communication in which one bird initiates a call and another one answers. Another type of vocalisation are contact calls, which are short and used to stay aware of each other's presence while flying and feeding (for example, magpie larks). This call usually consists of a short, high-pitched sound, recognised and duplicated exactly by mates. Very much like children playing the Marco Polo game!
Magpies produce some of the most complex songs and have one of the largest range of vocalisations of any songbirds. They can project sound at very high decibels and may be able to produce entirely different sounds simultaneously. In our next story, Bill tells of a magpie whose song had him wondering if the bird had listened to jazz legend John Coltrane.
JOHN COLTRANE, THE MUSICAL MAGPIE
Bill Coleman
While listening to our local neighbourhood magpie doing his morning warbling, I realised that he was making two notes at once! Not only this, but both notes moved together and appeared to make complex patterns in harmonic thirds. Similar to the music of saxophone legend John Coltrane, this bird's cascading notes overlapped in a way that seemed to reflect a mathematical symmetry. I've been totally blown away by this, and every time I hear a magpie I'm now listening closely to his call and wondering if there is more to it than we've given them credit for!
Birds that live in family or cooperative groups are constantly interacting with each other. This means you need a brain that is capable of learning (that is flexible), and driven to trying new things. Groups or families can change in size, structure and composition so birds need to learn who is who in their group and recognise new individuals.
Being social and having others to rely on is thought to have played an important role in the evolution of intelligence. This may be due to the complicated social pressures that come from group living. One such pressure is the need to understand and adapt to a mate and to others in the group. This requires a flexibility of behaviour that is particularly important in societies in which individuals have a history of interactions with others.
A number of Australian birds have cognitive abilities that match and even surpass those of mammals. Corvids and parrots/cockatoos, for example, appear to be cognitively superior to other birds, rival-ling great apes in many psychological domains. Cognition has been described as 'the mechanism by which animals acquire, process, store, and act upon information from the environment'. Biologist Irene Pepperberg provides a helpful analogy in one of her papers: 'The structural differences between mammalian and avian brains are like the wiring and processing differences between PCs and Apple Macs. However in both cases the resulting output (i.e. behaviour operations) is similar.'
Although there may be fundamental differences in the size and structure of avian and mammalian brains, recent evidence suggests that they share advanced cognitive abilities. While our brain neurons were sorting themselves into cortical layers to generate complex behaviour, birds were developing another neural architecture altogether. Some bird brains are packed with very high numbers of neurons where it counts, with densities akin to those found in primates and with connections much like ours. They have the ability to replace old brain cells with new ones that help the brain to be flexible so it can constantly learn. New neurons provide increased behavioural flexibility permissive for learning new and/or overwriting old memories.
You might be wondering how humans and birds, who are separated by a 320-million-year gulf of evolution, can have similar skills and abilities when it comes to social interactions? As we discussed in the preamble, the common ancestors that we share with birds were reptilian-like stem amniotes that lived more than 320 million years ago. During the course of this long, independent, evolutionary divergence, birds evolved in Australia while it was still part of Eastern Gondwana, while humans came out of Africa in Western Gondwana. In both environments, working together in cooperation was the winning trait for species survival.
Surviving in Eastern Africa and Australia required dealing with the unpredictable appearance and disappearance of food and water, while watching for predators. While we were evolving to stand up and walk on two feet, birds were perfecting lightness and flight to move between patches of food and water. We both felt safer in groups as we crossed the landscape in search of food and water. Bigger numbers in your group means more individuals to help you find what you are looking for. But you need to tell others if you are looking for food, water, or somewhere to raise a family. Constantly interacting with others means trying to predict their moods and behaviours as social environments are ever-changing and largely unpredictable. Group living requires considered and flexible responses to others, not just on some occasions but on a regular basis, even over lifetimes.
The size of a bird's social group can influence the information a bird chooses to transmit and the mechanism by which information transfer happens, for example a loud call for all to hear or a soft call just for one individual. How efficiently information is understood and used by others can also depend on group size. Therefore group size is connected to social complexity which influences the cognitive demands placed on the bird. This may be the reason birds have evolved a flexible brain: to allow them to process and retain information about social relationships, such as those with flock mates.
The social intelligence hypothesis supports this and suggests that the social pressures of group living have driven the evolution of a flexible, intelligent mind. Observations of social interactions among captive chimpanzees first prompted the hypothesis that social living and interacting with others plays an important role. The hypothesis suggests that those who are good at keeping track of the identities and interactions of numerous individuals within large social groups will do better than those who are less proficient. In other words, a charismatic and outgoing personal type works well when interacting with others to make alliances.
Birds from the corvid, parrot and artamidae families have relatively extended periods of juvenile development. That is, they pass through a long childhood before they reach/start breeding. It is during this time that birds have the opportunity to learn from others and explore their environment. The bird could learn through social learning from watching others, such as offspring observing parents. Another type of learning is through individual learning while exploring the world around it. Similar to us, long-lived birds appear to accumulate knowledge throughout their lives from interacting with others and from their own experience. They can use such knowledge to make better decisions and be better prepared to solve and adapt to future problems. It allows food to be found even if it is in a novel environment, as our next story tells.
OUT OF THE RAINFOREST
Dave Tribe
A couple of years ago I was over from England to visit my daughter. We spent a couple of days in the Daintree area of Queensland where we spent our time walking the various rainforest tracks and looking for cassowaries. A bit disappointed on our final day not to have seen one, we paid a visit to another of the local attractions, Daintree Ice Cream Company. The place was very good with a nice selection of flavours made from native ingredients. Anyway, we noticed a small crowd forming by the orchard, and, being human, went over to see what was going on. Well, who would have expected to see a male cassowary at the ice cream shop, let alone with his three chicks! They got a lot of attention as they poked around the fruit trees until they made their way back to the rainforest where they belonged.
As I said earlier, many of the stories sent to me ask the same question — Can a bird have a personality? In humans, is it our personality that makes us an individual, makes us who we are? Our personality or phenotype is a combination of our genetic material and life experiences. For example, how people interact with us and how we interact with them over long periods of time can help shape our personality. When a bird is long-lived with a long childhood of interacting with others, it too could develop a personality. A bird who is a shy individual in comparison with others would have had different experiences that affected how it interacted with others.
Birds, such as parrots, cockatoos and even wrens and thornbills, can form groups that are stable yet break up over the course of a day. We call these fission–fusion societies; societies in which numerous individuals move into and out of groups at various times of the day and night. A fission–fusion society is one in which size and composition change throughout the day. Do we live in a fission–fusion society? We move from our family group to a work/education group where we learn and contribute to society, then back to our smaller group at the end of the day where we share our day's events. As birds in pairs or small groups move through their environment, they merge into a larger group (fusion) at certain times such as when feeding or roosting at night. During fusion, learning happens. The birds talk to each other to find out who is present and who is not, and who are the dominant individuals and where they are in the roost. In the morning these groups might split (fission) into smaller groups to go about their business.
For instance, at night-time roosts or midday napping roosts, birds in these groups not only need to recognise other individuals but also understand intergroup relationships, for example the social status of individuals relative to other group members (dominance rank). They do this through communication, as Hannah found one morning.
SCREECHING CORELLAS
Hannah Tribe
One Sunday morning I was abruptly awoken by a raucous screeching flock of white parrots (little corellas) who had decided to interrupt my only lie-in of the week. I peered out of the window at the neighbouring garden, and thought, 'Heavens! There must be over a hundred birds in that gum tree!' Considering my own half-awake state, I wondered what matter could be so pressing, firstly that they needed to jabber so aggressively over each other and secondly, at six o'clock in the morning!
Possibly what Hannah was hearing was the birds discussing who the dominant birds were, re-establishing bonds from the previous day, and asking who knew where breakfast could be found! Birds maintain their place in fission–fusion societies in a number of ways, including special bonding calls, drumming, and even dancing. Individuals in long-term partnerships can evolve to match each other's state, to be in sync with another bird by changing body state. By doing this, the bird is sending information to another bird such as, 'I am thirsty, let's find water now.' They can do this through coordinating behaviours, such as synchronising their body movements, social displays and vocalisation. This allows messages to be shared between two bonded birds, possibly about what is happening in the moment.
Birds can also use a wide range of body postures for communicating a particular message and magpies are a great example of this. Some of the body postures issue warnings not to approach, such as an outstretched neck or sleeked-down head feathers. Others postures convey appeasement or submissiveness messages. A distinct submissive/appeasement gesture by magpies, also used by currawongs, is the flutter of the wings involving not the entire wing but mostly the primary feathers. Submissive behaviour can also be expressed by magpies; by falling down and rolling over on the back and exposing the belly.
Birds can use social cues, such as head and eye direction and pointing, that we can understand. So is it no wonder that when we meet we want to communicate, as our next story shows.
JULY THE MAGPIE
Anthea Tomkins
I have a great story to tell about birds, one in particular, a magpie named 'July'. She was a wild bird living at Aireys Inlet in Victoria. July was hand-fed prime minced steak. Mother would give her some meat saying, 'Did you have a nice day today?' July would reply as only a magpie can. 'That's nice,' Mother replied. July was named 'July' because that was the month in which they first met.
One day when my friend and I were visiting, we walked upstairs towards the lounge room where we could hear Mother talking to July, and July's song in response. We presumed Mother had left the glass door to the balcony open. Indeed she had! And the flywire screen door as well ...
There sitting in the house on the back of a dining room chair was July 'talking' as only a magpie can and Mother saying, 'Have you had a nice day, July?' July responded. 'How are your babies? Did you enjoy the nice warm day?'
Birds can behave in ways we are hard-pressed to understand yet seem so similar to our own. They seem to communicate with us and challenge us to understand what they are saying. Birds being very vocal reflects their need to communicate with and connect to others, especially their need to communicate the importance of working for a common goal, such as raising young or finding food. Both birds and humans rely on mates to navigate the harsh environment of post-rainforest Australia.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Your Backyard Birds"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Dr Gráinne Cleary.
Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
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