Birds
More than Just Dinosaurs
The window just beyond my computer screen looks out past a grove of trees and I can see the mountains beyond the sails of Canada Place. For half the year I can't see beyond the leaves in the grove.
I've always wanted to observe wild life in the wild - not in zoos. It took me a while to realize that my window is a very comfortable bird blind for observing birds. There is a lot of activity in the grove.
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I see crows of course. There are a few who like to hang out here during the day. It is hard to distinguish individual crows by their appearance but their behavior is distinctive too. I see a couple (assume mates) that hang out close together on a branch. Near by there is often third - friend of the family I imagine - maybe a child of the couple grown.
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There is a bigger flock that comes by too. That gathering reminds me in a way of the country dances I used to go to when I lived out in the woods where a bunch of us would gather in a community hall to hoot and holler and dance. There were notices in the general store of course but mostly we learned of the event by word of mouth.
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Makes me wonder about how crows communicate with each other. I'm sure they do but I can't decode harsh caws.
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Besides crows I see flocks of what my naturalist friend John used to call 'little brown birds'. Little brown birds (lbbs) are hard to observe in detail. They constantly flit about. I've managed with binoculars to see birds with different plumage - all birds in a flock had the same plumage. But a flock of lbbs is easy to see even with bad eyes. Little black dots that flit from branch to branch.
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They can fly up to a twig and land on it with both feet - as the twig sags under their tiny weight and hangs them upside down. They are cool with that and methodically explore the twig for . . . something. They walk along that bobbing twig like you or I would walk on a sidewalk.
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But they are clearly exploring - hunting - the crows might be looking for twigs for a nest but the lbbs are looking for food I surmise. I've read that they need to eat a lot to have enough energy to keep on flying.
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There is an invisible world on those twigs that those lbbs live on to get through the winter. I've tried inspecting the branches and twigs with binoculars to see what they are after but I never have seen anything. I have seen other hints of that invisible world. One day in November I found that a spider had built a web on the outside of my window. I'm on the 3rd floor and wonder how a spider would even get there.
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Crows and lbb's are perching birds at home in trees but they have evolved very different strategies to live. The crows are bigger and fairly intelligent and use trees as kind of a hangout place. Trees are a safe place for courtship and socializing and of course nesting. I have a fantasy that they can recognize me looking out through the glass. They certainly stand on a branch 20 feet away and seem to look at me fairly often.
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The lbb's don't seem to socialize the same way. They are more like a swarm buzzing around. I don't imagine that they are very smart - but the swarm provides an efficient foraging method. The little birds just flit quickly from twig to twig going along each checking for . . something I can't see. The constant flitting about makes them hard for predators to catch. I've wondered how a swarm like that maintains its cohesion. I guess their constant twittering informs each bird where the flock is.
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Gravity is a very different thing for birds than it is for me. They seem to have no fear of falling at all - which isn't a surprise since they are lightweight things that can fly. But also they have feet that have evolved to grip a branch. But they are amazing to watch. To leave a branch they sort of dive forward and fall until they are moving fast enough so their wings give lift. To land on a branch they approach from below fast and then stop flying so they coast up to a stop just at the branch. It's like watching a gymnast stick their landing.
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One thing that impresses me about birds is that they have tiny brains (by mammalian standards) yet those bird brains enable a huge number of very sophisticated behaviours.
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Both crows and lbb's need to have a lifestyle that thwarts predators. Say your local predator is another bird - a peregrine falcon that can drop on you from high in the sky in a blink of the eye.
Peregrines have been said to be the fastest animals on earth. What's the defense. The prey of those falcons have learned to stay in the trees where the falcons can't fly.
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They didn't learn it from personal experience. What happened is that the birds who were easy prey for the falcons got eaten up and didn't reproduce. The ones that preferred the shelter of trees did reproduce. Hence we get flocks of little brown birds flitting around in sheltering trees.
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This is evolution at work but I wonder how it works on the level of bird brains. Bird brains are sets of neurons that cause the bird to behave in various ways. It makes me wonder about my own brain.
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What do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.