People consider starlings pests, but I don’t. The avifauna around here would be poorer for having no enormous roadside flocks of shimmery black beauties swarming in the evening. (See this previous post for an example of the enormous proportions this phenomenon reaches in Europe.) And they can talk.

 
Corvids are known from other observations and experiments to be smart, so this level of problem-solving wouldn’t seem to be beyond them, but it’s always good to maintain a bit of skepticism. There may be confirmation bias at work here: there’s a population of crows in this city in Japan, dropping nuts at various places, and we notice and marvel at the ones that happen to do so at intersections, and not so much at the others. A quick search of recent journal articles didn’t reveal anything about it (well, I did find one book, but it just cited the Attenborough special); still, if the behavior here is observed repeatedly, and if, as some reports have it, they’ve been observed moving the nuts to a different location if the cars miss them, it’s probably reasonable to conclude that the purported learning is real.

The PBS companion site to the Attenborough special has a good introduction to this and other commonly known examples of avian intelligence.

 
As in the bowerbirds, these are examples of sexual selection run wild.

The species involved here is the European starling, Sturnus vulgaris. They’re an invasive species in North America. The species was intentionally released by a group called the American Acclimatization Society

European Starling, Cabin Lake Viewing Blinds, Deschutes National Forest, Near Fort Rock, Oregon. Image retrieved from NaturesPicsOnline.

in Central Park in 1890. Their goal was to bring to the New World all the types
of birds mentioned in the works of William Shakespeare. The mention of a starling comes in Henry IV, Part I, when, in Act I, Scene 3, Hotspur proposes: “I’ll have a starling shall be taught to speak / Nothing but Mortimer, and give it him, / To keep his anger still in motion.” (Hotspur is correct that starlings can be taught to speak; they’re excellent mimics with a capacity for eerily clear human speech. Weewoo, for example, has been given her own MySpace page.) The group released 60 birds; there are now in North America over 200,000,000, and they’ve reached Alaska. It’s often considered a pest and a bully, but a 2003 paper in Conservation Biology suggests that beliefs on its effect on native species populations may be overblown.*

At any rate, I’m glad they’re here. Even the relatively tiny flocks I see around here are impressive, and it’s always a pleasant surprise when a small group swoop in and hang around in the backyard for a while. They’ll walk briskly and purposefully in a staggered formation through the grass, moving uniformly like spread-out infantry taking over a marshy field in some Vietnam War movie, as they look for insects. They’re too big to get into the bluebird house, so they’re not a problem on that front (unlike the native House sparrows, who use it all summer). And I know a few places on the campus of my university where they can be counted on to roost in the evenings. So it’s fortunate, I suppose, that starling has two syllables and totally fits the meter of that verse.

For further info on starlings in America, see here and here.

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* Koenig, W. D. 2003. European Starlings and their effect on native cavity-nesting birds. Conservation Biology 17: 1134-1140.

Ornithology – David Attenborough – “The Bowerbird”

I really, really love bowerbirds. Their display behavior is a fascinating example of sexual selection, and their capacity to make individual aesthetic choices raises intriguing philosophical questions. If I can dig up some documentation about the ability of some of them to actually manufacture paint from berries and roots and use it to ornament the interior of their bowers, I’ll post that, too, and explore some of those questions in more depth.

calopsita bate o pé

Now, there are some particular things about his performance that merit attention, although it’s vital to add the caveat that we have no information on what sort of training or conditioning led to this behavior. First is the impeccable sense of rhythm, and second is the abstraction required to imitate the foot tapping. The bird has to understand, on some level, that his own leg is analogous to the quite different-looking and quite differently proportioned appendage of the gigantic creature standing in front of him, and that his movement of it should likewise be analogous. (This level of abstraction is hailed as notable when dolphins do it by, for example, waving a flipper in response to being waved at.) And third is the focused concentration he trains squarely on his owner; he seems to be paying attention and wanting to get the performance correct.

These, again, are just speculations and observations based on this one context-free clip. The behavior could be a result of simple operant conditioning, but there’s enough here to be intriguing. I still feel safe saying, though, that if the point of the creation of the universe was to lead to the existence of this cockatiel, then the universe was worth it.