Who they are and what they do
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First published as Consider the Birds by Allen Lane 2008
Published under the current title in Penguin Books 2009
Copyright © Colin Tudge, 2008
Illustrations copyright © Jane Milloy, 2008
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
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ISBN: 978-0-14-196210-8
List of illustrations
List of figures
Acknowledgements
Preface
I
A Different Way of Being
1 What It Means to be a Flier
2 How Birds Became
II
Dramatis Personae
3 Keeping Track: The Absolute Need to Classify
4 All the Birds in the World: An Annotated Cast List
III
How Birds Live Their Lives
5 The Eating Machine
6 The World as an Oyster
7 Idyll and Mayhem: The Sex Lives of Birds
8 Families and Friends
9 The Mind of Birds
IV
Birds and Us
10 Living with Birds and Learning from Birds
Epilogue: A Matter of Attitude
Further Reading
Index
THE SECRET LIFE OF BIRDS
When Colin Tudge was a small boy in South London he could recognize only five kinds of bird. Following a childhood spent at London Zoo and in conversation by the seaside with a bird-watching cousin, he began to perceive that ‘ordinary birds’ included pipits and wagtails, terns and kestrels, yellowhammers and robins, and a miscellany of crows, not all of which were black. So began a lifelong interest in birds and how they live.
After studying zoology at Cambridge, Colin began writing about science, first as features editor at the New Scientist and then as a presenter of science programmes for BBC radio. Now a full-time writer, he appears regularly as a public speaker in all kinds of venues, including the University of Beijing and St Paul’s Cathedral. A Fellow of the Linnean Society of London, he also spent ten years as a visiting Research Fellow at the Centre of Philosophy at the London School of Economics. He is passionate about food and farming and is currently involved in the founding of The Landshare Trust for Enlightened Agriculture. His books include The Secret Life of Trees, The Variety of Life and So Shall We Reap.
To my grandchildren
The courtship flight of the Hen-harrier is pure display
One of the great sights of the Southern Ocean – diving petrels
Archaeopteryx: was this the very first bird of all?
Mononykus at first sight looked nothing like a bird
Hesperornis from the Cretaceous was perhaps the most maritime of all birds
This perfectly plausible scene includes birds from eight of the thirty or so living orders
All the main groups of ratites, living and dead
The most primitive of all the living anseriforms – Australia’s Magpie Goose
Wood Ducks can live only where there are woodpeckers to make the holes in trees that they need
Coots are wonderfully aggressive
A spooky encounter: in many an Indian village you may come face to face with an Adjutant Stork
Anhingas, alias snakebirds, hunt underwater like cats
The largest penguin ever was Platydyptes
Characteristically, Red and Green Macaws fly arrow-straight, line ahead
The beak of the toucan is partly functional and partly for show
Tough, muscular lungfish, deep in their African swamps, seem safe from predators – but not from the formidable Shoebill
Arctic Skuas are broad-based hunters – and also efficient pirates
Australian farmers conducted major ‘emu wars’ against sometimes vast flocks of Emus
Hummingbirds like this Streamertail are not only avian nectar-feeders but they are the most specialist
Helmeted Guineafowl make their way in orderly fashion to the waterhole
Avocets feed most efficiently in the company of other avocets
Pigeons – like this rare crowned pigeon – feed their young with cheesy ‘milk’
Bar-headed Geese migrate almost at jumbo-jet height over the Himalayas
As perfectly synchronized as Rogers and Astaire – the mating sequence of the Great Crested Grebe
Male frigatebirds flash their inflated, scarlet throat pouches to attract females
Many male game birds like these Sage Grouse display en masse to the females
Birds of paradise are often beautiful to the human eye and sometimes absurd
Albert’s Lyrebird display their brilliance with a visual display and endlessly inventive mimicry
One of the world’s most conspicuous and apparently vulnerable nests – but its creator, the Hammerkop, is flourishing
The nests of the Baya Weaver Bird are among the great architectural achievements of all animals
The Greater Flamingo breeds in communes, laying its eggs on towers of mud built in a swamp
One individual stands sentinel in groups of Arabian Babblers, while the others enjoy their feeding
Female hornbills wall themselves in to the nest hole and must then rely upon the male to forage
Reed Warblers seem happy to lavish their care on the monstrous young of cuckoos
Konrad Lorenz’s pet cockatoo flies off with Frau Lorenz’s knitting wool. Do parrots have a sense of humour?
Animal instinct in action: baby Herring Gulls peck at a red spot on the mother’s beak
Greater Black-backed Gulls break the shells of armoured animals by dropping them from a height. Cormorants meanwhile stick to hunting underwater
Geniuses of the bird world: New Caledonian Crows not only use tools, but make the tools first
Western Scrub-jays ‘cache’ food to use later – but if they notice other birds spying on them they come back and move it
Peregrines are taking to city life worldwide
Dodos were depicted as amiable and rotund. But they may have been lean and mean
It’s impossible to predict which birds will take to life in cities: the Nacunda Nighthawks of Brazil
1. The relationships of reptiles
2. How archosaurs gave rise to the birds
3. How birds are related to the rest of the dinosaurs
4. How modern birds are related
5. The relationships of perching birds: Passeriformes (The captions to figs. 4 and 5 can be found on pp. 481–2)
Figures 1 to 3 are based mainly on Assembling the Tree of Life, edited by Joel Cracraft and Michael Donoghue, and on Vertebrate Palaeontology (second edition) by Michael Benton. See Further Reading for details. For the sources of Figures 4 and 5 see pp. 481–2.
I was first launched on the road to bird-dom by my cousin Peter Selwood, who lived by the sea and is a few years older than I am, and first made me aware that not all birds are the sparrows, pigeons, and park pond ducks of my native South London. There are pipits and hobbies and terns and goodness knows what out there (not least in South London, had I but realized). I was prompted to start writing this book by my old university friend Barrie Lees – when I was half-way through writing my book on trees. ‘Trees are all very well,’ he said, ‘but birds do more. I want to know about birds’ – and I thought, ‘Why not?’
In general I am indebted to everyone who ever taught me biology – although for the particular purposes of this book I am especially grateful to the following, who gave me advice and in some cases read the various chapters. Roughly in the order in which I talked to them: Luis Chiappe and Joel Cracraft at the American Museum of Natural History, New York, with whom I had long and absorbing conversations on bird evolution and phylogeny. Carl Jones of the Mauritius Wildlife Foundation taught me a great deal about bird conservation – his own work in saving the Mauritius Kestrel is a conservation classic. Roger Wilkinson, director of science at Chester Zoo (now the leading zoo in mainland Britain), was curator of birds when I first did some work for Chester in the 1990s – and he very kindly read the longest chapter for me. When I was attached to the Darwin Centre at the London School of Economics I learned a great deal about the evolution of animal minds from Helena Cronin, Nick Humphrey, Oliver Curry, and Jennifer Scott (whose work on gorillas is quite brilliant). At Oxford, I have received generous help from Andrew Lack of Brookes University and from Alex Kacelnik from the Department of Zoology at Oxford University. David Mcfarland, previously at Cambridge, also greatly improved my appreciation of animal psychology, and the philosophy thereof. From Warwick Fox at the University of Central Lancashire I have learned much of what I know about theory of mind. Neal Smith, a wonderfully original thinker at the Smithsonian Institution in Panama, has alerted me to quite new lines of thought over the past few years and again read passages of this book. I am very grateful to Richard Holdaway of the University of Canterbury for discussions on bird migration (and look forward to the publication of his present research, which promises to put a new slant on the whole subject). Many thanks too to Professor Tom Kemp, of Oxford University, who read and advised on matters of evolution. My neighbour Ian Lees, an accomplished birder and bird photographer, read bits of the text for me and made some cogent comments. The best birding I have ever done was in the company of John Butler in Spain, but when I sought to remind myself of his address on his website I was shocked to learn that he died in September 2007 –a very sad loss indeed, for all kinds of reasons. (Brian Davies and Yolanda Davies-Papen are to continue his work. Their website – Donana Bird Tours – should surely be checked out.)
After all of the above had given me their input, the draft was greatly improved by Helen Conford of Penguin Books, who got me to do a lot of restructuring; and the finished text was enormously enhanced by the brilliant illustrations of Jane Milloy.
Finally, I am absolutely indebted to my wife, Ruth West, off whom I bounce all ideas and without whose encouragement and organizational skills I would surely have lapsed into total inertia years ago.
Colin Tudge, Wolvercote, February 2009
As a small boy in South London just after the Second World War I recognized only five kinds of birds. There were pigeons and sparrows, which were everywhere; the ducks and swans in the local parks; and a mixed category of ‘ordinary birds’ which flew overhead from time to time, and perched on roofs, for no particular reason, except that they were birds, and that’s what birds do. London Zoo soon broadened my horizons, with its Ostriches, Emus, and penguins, a statutory line-up of torpid owls like fluffy Russian dolls with revolving heads, and a huge array of parrots (London Zoo had two of each species in those days – or sometimes only one of each). There was also a mad-eyed creature in a tall Gothic cage labelled ‘Monkey-eating Eagle’, which opened its vast horny beak in a most suggestive fashion and frightened us all to death. Then my cousin Peter, out in Kent, conceived a passion for bird nesting – which boys were still encouraged to do in those days, along with the pinning of butterflies after giving them a quick whiff of chloroform (‘which may be had from your local chemist for a few pence’); and I began to perceive that ‘ordinary birds’ included pipits and wagtails, terns and Kestrels, Yellowhammers and Robins, and a miscellany of crows, not all of which were black.
I went at the age of five to a Church of England primary school. It was my first taste of religion – and a very kindly taste it was too; the way that religion ought to be; songs and stories and being nice to people. The ‘nature table’ was a shrine: a fir cone, a twig of willow with catkins, a mushroom, and a couple of unidentified rodent skulls from a local bomb-site (there were three or four close by) of the kind that nowadays would bring in the disposal squad from Health and Safety, in jump-suits and welders’ masks, to drop them with long tongs into polythene bags. But although we all caught measles and sneezles and whooping cough and mumps – ‘common childhood ailments’ as they were called – we did manage to avoid Weill’s disease and bubonic plague, although I imagine only by a whisker. There was also a glossy magazine, a huge departure in those austere times, with a picture of shorebirds mysteriously labelled ‘Oystercatchers and Knots’.
I was hooked. It isn’t formal teaching that gets you into things, or at least not necessarily. It’s the incidentals. I took it to be self-evident from about the age of six that everyone must be obsessed with ‘nature’, and am still shocked to find how far and how often that is from the case.
The problem, once you are hooked, is how to get close to living creatures, how to engage with them. One way is simply to learn: I was lucky to go to a school where biology was taught brilliantly, and then to an ancient and therefore damp and crumbling university full of Nobel Prize-winning biologists. I never wanted to be a professional scientist myself. I just liked, and like, being with the creatures themselves, and the ideas, and matching words to the ideas. So I write books about them.
The last such book was on trees – my other life-long indulgence – but as it progressed my friend Barrie Lees said, ‘I already know about trees’, as indeed he does. ‘What I really want to know about is birds. They keep coming into the garden. They fiddle about. What are they? What are they up to? Why are they doing whatever they do?’
These are good questions. There really are more than five species of birds in London. Indeed the current list for London stands at 357. They all have names, too: none should be called an ‘ordinary bird’. I am sure that birds do many things for no particular reason – but the more you look, the more you find this isn’t necessarily so. The Starlings swirling overhead are returning from a hard day’s foraging in the surrounding fields. If agricultural practice changes, the Starlings suffer. The Blackbird that hops from twig to twig as it strips the cotoneaster berries is not a fidget with a low attention span. Its movements are strategic – designed, or evolved, to deny the cats and Sparrowhawks a sitting target. The female sparrow with her body to the ground, shivering her wings, is inviting the male to copulate. The flock of sparrows, twittering and apparently quarelling with no particular aim, are forming social bonds, and sussing each other out; showing all the others what they are made of. Among those others are potential mates, and it pays to make a good impression. It is all very serious, because life is serious. Life requires nourishment – which can be hard to arrange; whether you eat berries or Blackbirds you have to be skilled. Life requires mates, or the lineage comes to a stop – and that requires the ability to seduce, and the ability to see off rivals, and – in both cases – the ability to socialize: to know who’s who. Then you have to raise the babies, and in most cases you need to do all this before winter sets in. In short, life is complicated and it needs very good timing.
So this is the book that Barrie said should be written. I’m glad he put me up to it. In many ways I’m sorry it’s finished.
In Britain, at least, there are three ranks of recognized birdwatchers. First there are the ‘twitchers’. They seek primarily to see as many different species as possible. In these internet days twitchers form a network that spreads nationwide, and is even international. If someone in the east of England spots some rarity – invariably a ‘vagrant’: some poor bewildered and half-starved creature blown off course by a cross-wind – then the buzz goes out and hundreds of twitchers in lurid hues of anorak, with cameras and field glasses of all shapes and sizes from pince-nez to howitzer, crowd in around it like a bullfight. In Dorset, in England’s south-west, I was recently caught in the frenzy around a Ring Ouzel – like a Blackbird but with a white ring around its neck. Twitchers may be mocked, in some circles, and they sometimes trample on the nests of native birds while they focus on the hapless stray (or so it is alleged). But largely through their efforts we know which birds go where, and to some extent how often. All in all they are a valuable group.
Then there are the ‘birders’. They are not necessarily pros, but they may, like a fellow I met recently, spend three days waist-deep in an Irish bog for a glimpse of a Bluethroat; or weeks and weeks, their careers in jeopardy, watching the nest of an Osprey. They also help professionals in their national bird counts. Birders too are a very useful breed – and one of the most productive examples in all science of the pro–am connection.
Top of the hierarchy are the professional ornithologists. They do the serious research. These days they are astonishing both in their persistence and in their ingenuity. There will be many examples in this book.
For my part, to be truthful, I have stood apart from this hierarchy. I have not risked drowning and hypothermia and duck-lice in bogs, or dangled on strings from lonely cliffs to count the parasites of Kittiwakes, or led a skein of migrating geese in a microplane. But I have been privileged this past forty years to travel around the world (before the days when air travel was known to be wrecking the climate) and wherever I went I was keen to see what was what. Some of it has been pure indulgence. I saw my first Brown Pelicans from a jacuzzi in a hotel garden in California (paid for by a kind employer). The closest I have ever been to a kingfisher was on a hotel roof in Panama. It perched about two feet from my tea. I saw my first wild parrots from a hotel pool in Delhi – glowing grass-green in the low evening sun and flying in convoy straight as arrows, as parrots do. But I have also gone out wherever possible with local guides, more or less the world over. All of them were very fine – real enthusiasts with excellent knowledge who knew where to look. Best of all was John Butler in the Cota Doñana in south-west Spain – an ex-army man of the finest type, tireless, patient, extremely knowledgeable, and endlessly meticulous. (As noted in the acknowledgements, I was shocked to learn of John’s recent death. A great loss.)
You may think it is foolish of me to acknowledge my own relative lack of direct involvement with the birding scene – you could after all be reading books by full-time ornithologists – but here, to a large extent, is my point. Nature is wonderful – it is the centre of everything – and if you take a serious interest, it changes your life. The word ‘jargon’, meaning meaningless jabbering, comes from the French for the twittering of birds. But in truth the twittering of birds is never meaningless. The birds twitter for a reason – and it won’t be a frivolous reason. As you become more aware you start to get a feel for the reason of things. All nature acquires meaning. You realize then – and it is perhaps the most important thing to realize – that simply to be alive and aware in such a world as this is a privilege. If people in high places felt this, the world would be very different. You don’t have to be a pro, or even spend a weekend in a swamp, to see the truth of it. You just have to take an interest, and be alert. The point of this book is to nudge people who feel in a general way that birds in particular and nature in general are kind of interesting to the point where they start to feel the meaning of it all. After that – well, life can never be the same again.
So here’s the plan. The book is divided into four parts.
Chapter 1, in Part I, points out how very brilliant birds are – an altogether superior class of creature – and also points to a puzzle: that birds do most of the things that mammals do and a few more besides – and yet they seem to differ from mammals in all details in which it is possible to be different. But what’s the basis for this claim – that birds are ‘superior’? And why should they be the same as mammals – the same as us – and yet so different? Chapter 2 provides the answer – or at least, as much of an answer as can be provided. It lies, of course, in evolution, for as the great Ukrainian-American biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky famously opined in an essay of 1973, ‘Nothing makes sense in biology except in light of evolution.’ Chapter 2 also looks at the still vexed issue of whether birds descended from dinosaurs. If they did, then strictly speaking birds are dinosaurs. The dinosaurs did not disappear when the putative asteroid struck, 65 million years ago. They are calling to us from every hedgerow.
Chapter 3 – the first chapter of Part II – asks how many species of birds there really are in the world. To anticipate – it’s a lot, but nobody knows how many for sure and we never will, for reasons both practical and philosophical. This chapter also asks how we can possibly keep track of so many – to which the answer is: classify. The modern science of taxonomy takes us into some of the most subtle reaches of biology – and as DNA studies come on board they are producing some big surprises. Chapter 4 is an annotated cast list. It’s quite a long cast list, because there are a lot of birds. Without good classification, there would be no sense in such a list.
The five chapters of Part III are the guts of the book. They ask what birds actually do – and why they do it, and how. Chapter 5 asks how they get their energy – feeding, in other words – and it’s a big question. There’s a lot to it. They need the right apparatus, of course (including the great talons and beak of the Monkey-eating Eagle), but they also need the right strategy. Strategy is all. The Blackbird’s fidgety feeding is part of life’s strategy. So too are the often vast migrations that a large proportion of birds undertake each year – sometimes from pole to pole – as they strive to take advantage of the tropics and subtropics when the high latitudes are cold, and of the long, long days of the polar summers when they have young to feed. How they do this is discussed in Chapter 6.
Then to sex and reproduction in Chapters 7 and 8 – the most absorbing matter of all: because it demands such extravagant behaviour; and because, above all, it requires layer upon layer of sociality. One modern and very convincing theory says that the need to attract mates, to see off rivals, and to raise offspring, with all the social intricacies that this implies, was the prime reason why some animals – notably some birds and mammals – evolved such big brains. Reproductive success belongs not simply to the swift and the strong but to the clever (and amusing and sociable).
Actually, it is not altogether obvious why animals have brains at all – since brains are, after all, such expensive organs to maintain. Trees live immensely complicated lives – it’s not just a matter of standing still with their arms out – and they get by without a brain. Even among animals, some have found it expedient to dispense with brains; such as barnacles, which stick themselves to a rock head down, so their head and what they had of a brain is reduced to a blob of blu-tack. It works for them: there are billions of barnacles in the world. Of course, animals that move around – as most do – need brains of a sort, to coordinate their movements. But why be as clever as a crow or a parrot? Social complexity may be the answer. But it leaves the highly intriguing question – addressed in Chapter 9 –of what actually goes on in the head of a crow or a parrot (or, for that matter, of a sparrow or a chicken)? What do they perceive? What do they think? Do they think like us – or are they as different from us in their cogitations as they are in their anatomy and physiology? In short – what is it like to be a bird?
Part IV is about birds and us. Birds enhance our lives enormously, if we let them. We, in return, are killing them off. We need to understand why we are doing this. The same destructiveness that is killing them is killing us. Here again the birds can help us: by thinking about them, we can gain insight into ourselves – including insight into our own psychology. Again, it seems, the insights that are emerging are not as commonly expected.
Jesus said, ‘Consider the fowls of the air’ (Matthew 6:26).* Indeed.
* The King James translation gives us ‘Behold the fowls of the air’; the New Jerusalem Bible offers ‘Look at the birds in the sky’; and other versions I have looked at offer one or the other. None says ‘consider’. However, according to the Greek–English New Testament Lexicon (as originally edited by W. Bauer), Matthew in the ‘original’ Greek (that is, the text from which modern versions are taken) uses the verb ‘embleppon’ (which I regret I don’t know how to render in Greek script). This verb recurs throughout the New Testament with many connotations, including: what can be seen; look at; fix one’s gaze upon; look for a way (to do something); note; and – consider.
The Oxford-based theologian I have consulted agrees that ‘consider the birds’ is a perfectly valid translation for Matthew 6:26 and indeed gives more of the intended flavour than ‘Behold’, or ‘Look at’. So I feel fully justified in offering this variant.