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The Human Nature of Birds by Theodore Xenophon Barber, Ph.D.
available in paperback from Penguin Books.
A revision of our understanding of animal intelligence is long overdue. I
have found this wonderful book to be an excellent starting point in the process
of regaining our ability to witness and appreciate the lives of beings sharing
this biosphere with us. While Barber focuses on birds, he mentions other animals,
and his arguments are equally valid for other species.
I have excerpted below the gist of chapter 9 which summarizes the author's
arguments and conclusions.
8/96: A Complementary volume has been published,
written by Susan McCarthy and Jeffrey Masson, called,"When Elephants Weep: The
Emotional Life of Animals" Here is a discussion with one of the authors.
The Human Nature of Birds:
OVERVIEW OF BIRD INTELLIGENCE
"The large number of research results that have been discussed in the preceding
chapters converge on seven very important conculsions.
First, the assumption that "birds are instinctual while humans are
intelligent" has been shown to be wrong; recent scientific discoveries
demonstrate that both birds and humans are innately programmed to carry out their
species' specialties. Each of the instinctual programs that guide birds to carry
out characteristic human behaviors -- such as flying, constructing a particular
kind of nest, and mating with a bird of the same species -- are actualized via
moment-to-moment decisions requiring intelligence and new learning. The human
child implements its language instinct by attending to and intelligently learning
and integrating particular (human) sounds in its environment; in essentially the
same way, the young bird implements its migrational-navigational instinct by
focusing on and intelligently learning and integrating information provided by
sun, stars, winds, geomagnetism, and other natural phenomena.
Second, the cognitive abilities of birds have been vastly underestimated.
Like humans, birds are able to generalize, form abstractions and nonverbal
concepts, and discriminate and integrate many sourcs of information. In general,
they remember, or "store" past information as proficiently as humans. At times,
when it is useful in their niche, they manifest a long-term memory that is
superior to that of most humans.
Third, birds communicate, or "speak", to their flockmates by calls, songs,
and a complex body language that includes many subtle changes in the eyes, crest,
beak, feathers, wings, and every other aspect of the avian body. They
communicate to their flockmates everything that is relevant or of interest to
them. The more deeply research probes into bird communication, the more certain
it becomes that birds "speak" with their bodies and with their voices to each
other about all the significant immediate facts of their life. Like nonliterate
humans living in an outdoor environment, they "speak" to each other about the
important daily events -- the rain, the animals, food, water, mating, offspring,
and so on. Birds such as parrots, parakeets, and starlings, which have the
physical capability to articulate the sounds used by humans, can speak to people
meaningfully. To what extent they learn to speak meaningfully depends primarily
on how much patient effort humans devote to relating with them, bonding with
them, speaking intentionally and contextually with them, and teaching them words
and phrases. The evidence indicates that birds can come to understand the
meaning of human vocalizations and body language just as humans can come to
understand avian vocalizations and body language.
Fourth, we now know that the assumption "birds are instinctually driven
machines," led earlier investigators to miss the flexibility in avian behaviour.
The accumulated evidence has now made this flexibility obvious. It can be seen
in birds who sensibly and flexibly vary virtually every aspect of their behaviour
in their winter and summer homes, for instance, behaving as solitary, day-active,
insect eaters in their northern home and as social, twilight-active, fruit eaters
in their southern abode. Avian flexibility also is seen in the drastic changes
in behaviour with variations in the food supply - not laying eggs or not
incubating the eggs when there is insufficient food (avian "birth control"),
raising more offspring when there is plenty of food, and sensibly not feeding the
weakest chick in the brood when there is insufficient food for the parents and
all the nestlings. Avian flexibility is also manifest in the way conspecific
birds build their nests differently depending on the nature of the local
predators.
Fifth, in their natural environment, birds enjoy playing in various ways
that resemble the play of human children. Perhaps someday all human children
will have the opportunity to enjoy playing together with birds. Also, since each
bird is as much a unique individual as any human, each new bird our children get
to know well can be as interesting as a new friend from a very different culture;
the next generation of humans can have the same kind of exciting pleasure with
birds that was experienced by field anthropologists a century ago who first
befriended an African pygmy, an Australian aborigine, a Hopi, or a Samoan.
Sixth, birds experience the same fundamental feelings and emotions as
humans - they can be contented and happy and even ecstatic as well as sad and
hopeless and forlorn, and they can manifest parental love, close friendships, and
erotic love. They can show concern and benevolent caring for a mate, for their
offspring, for their siblings, and for ailing or crippled flockmates and even, at
times, for members of other species (including Homo sapiens .
(Befriended birds can not only be friends to our children but also share their
concerns and show affection and love for them.)
Seventh, birds have a sense of the beautiful, a general aesthetic sense,
just as humans do. They can also compose and sing songs that human musicians
admire and can sing duets, trios, quartets, and even quintets antiphonally or
polyphonically.
The Human Nature of Birds by Theodore Xenophon Barber, Ph.D.
available in paperback from Penguin Books.
Animalia Event: Monkeys Attack
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