What the Barn Swallows Know

Bird Brain Genius by Ken Korczak

As a bookseller (and as a writer) I have watched the changes sweeping the publishing industry with interest.  The rise of ebooks, and of readers like Kindle and Nook, have not been kind to small sellers, but I still find myself excited by the whole knew frontier opening up for online publishing.  No one seems to know exactly where it's going, and that is always thrilling.  And scary.  As the old Chinese proverb/curse says, we live in interesting times.

The upside of the new formats is the rise of independent publishers, many of them aimed at very specific niches -- erotic paranormal romance or zombie apocalypse fiction -- with their own enthusiastic audiences.  Those who don't spend a lot of time online, or haven't really looked at what's out there, might be surprised.  A new publishing industry is sprouting up, full of diverse voices and perspectives.

The down side is that this new zone, as yet, has very little structure and often lacks the experience, quality control, and filtering that big traditional publishers provide.  In many cases, authors are publishing themselves -- something that has always been an option, but which online sales and marketing, and now ebooks, have made incredibly easy.  The problem is that these books may never have benefited from professional editing and the kind of feedback that authors traditionally receive on the way to print. (Or its electronic equivalent.)

A really good example of both the strengths and the weaknesses of this new paradigm is Bird Brain Genius by Ken Korczak.  The book is available on Amazon Kindle, which is where I stumbled across it.  Korczak provides a little back story -- he says that he witnessed the central events when he was working as a newspaper reporter in 1984, and that it was so unbelievable that neither his editor, nor any of the non-fiction publications he sent it to would publish it.  Finally, he decided to expand it into a short novel.  He makes a point of saying that he no longer cares whether anyone believes it or not, "It's just a great story."

And that, at least, is true.

Bird Bran Genius, set in the farm country of Minnesota, concerns two eccentric, white-trash twins, Cadmus and Buford Dziekonski, who own a failing farm and who happen to be mathematical idiot-savants.  The brothers are not good farmers, and their farm, like most of the farms around, is in trouble.  None-the-less, Cadmus becomes obsessed with a pair of barn swallows -- who he names Sabik and Bellatrix -- who have built their nest across from the brothers' front porch.  Watching the birds -- and "contemplating complex temporal-spatial equations based in chaos theory" -- Cadmus begins to create a bizarre intellectual game. 

... he visualized a three-dimensional grid in the large yard that opened east of the farm house. To that he added four-dimensional space-time continuum factors, which only he could grasp effectively. Cadmus' imaginary grid was rectangular, some 75 yards wide by 50 meters high. It was about 50 meters deep. Within the grid, Cadmus further visualized internal cubical sections, and assigned numerical values to each one of them. He also gave them colors to add more variables. After some practice, his powerful imagination could easily and automatically project this mental grid out into the wide space east of the farm house. Sabik and Bellatrix spent much of their time passing through the imaginary grid as they hunted for insects and returned to their nest where the hungry offspring eagerly swallowed the insect victuals. Cadmus soon became absorbed in his game. He noticed that each time Sabik and Bellatrix passed through his mental grid and intersected the individual values assigned to it, they returned to the nest with a specific score. Sometimes Sabik flew through the grid in a way that earned a very high score. At other times, his score was low, at other times middling. Bellatrix did the same.

And so, Tumulus is born.  A game based on keeping score of the bird's passages through the imaginary grid.  When other people from the town find out about it, they flock to the brothers' farm each evening to listen to Cadmus call the game, complete with its own arcane lexicon and dramatic flourishes. 

"Here comes Sabik ... OH! He enters warbling into Purple Sector 9! MOOLTANNA! A good one! He's down, flicks-back, an astro-turn ... WAIT! YIKES! He flickbacks DOUBLE and comes in for a brood roost vigorous! Terrific score, Sabik!! 389 debens!"

The game becomes such a hit that the townspeople begin betting on it, and soon hundreds and hundreds of dollars are changing hands over every round, even though Cadmus and Buford remain innocent of the gambling.  Cadmus is concerned only with calling the games, keeping his statistics, and with his growing unease at what the statistics suggest.  For the scores of the two birds are steadily increasing.  The birds' performance at Tumulus is improving -- as if the birds understand the game, as if they are deliberately competing.  Buford, for his part, totally rejects that possibility, and becomes obsessed with finding the hidden mathematical artifact that must be skewing Cadmus's data.

Around this story is the bleak picture of traditional farm life dying.  Family farms are being foreclosed, and generations of tradition are disappearing.  There is also a sweet, remarkably innocent and romantic love story between the brothers' niece Minerva and the Farm AG agent, whose job it is to foreclose on the Dziekonski farm.

This is a very compelling story, with something of the flavor of Mark Twain's "What Stumped the Blue Jay".  It is in the sketching of the colorful characters, the description of the town, the playing of the sentimental and wistful romantic subplot -- and most of all in describing the intriguing mystery of the game of Tumulus -- that the book's strengths lay.

But, unfortunately, it has flaws too.  What this feels like, more than anything, is the first draft of a good story by a good writer.  I mentioned earlier the lack of structure and feedback that comes from self-publishing, or publishing outside the traditional mold.  And this book definitely shows that lack.  It has all the kinds of mistakes that every writer makes in early drafts -- punctuation, grammar, shifts in tense, slips in point-of-view, awkward phrasing, and elements of the story that haven't quite jelled.  The kinds of things that a few good readers and a good editor help whip into shape.  It's a testament to the strength of the story, and the author's raw talent, that the book is still engaging despite these problems.

As it stands, Bird Brain Genius is fun, interesting little story whose lack of polish will, unfortunately, stop a lot of readers from getting through it.

With a little editing and little development here and there, it could be a very good book.

Where the Birds Is

The Art of Bird Finding by Pete Dunne

 

"Whether you know it or not," writes Pete Dunne in his new book, The Art of Bird Finding, "you are a bird-finding machine.  Under the shell of your modern veneer, stripped down to raw sensory receptors, Mr. and Mrs. Homo Sapiens are genetically to pick up the clues that say:  LOOK!  LOOK!  BIRD HERE."

That's a comforting thought on frustrating days when I can barely make out any of the tiny songbirds flitting about my yard.  Much less identify the birds I can hear but never quite locate at the park.  Most of us think of ourselves as bird-watchers, although more often the goal seems to be bird identification.  But whatever we're looking for (pun intended) the first step is seeing the birds in the first place.  And Dunne's wonderfully succinct new guide is devoted to helping us do just that.

As a birder, I probably rely too much on my camera.  I'm not fond of binoculars -- mostly because I've never learned to use them effectively, and Dunne has some helpful hints here -- but I found that his discussion of the pros and cons of binoculars applied equally well to how I use the camera. 

Think of the advantages that are diminished or nullified when you bring your binoculars up to your eyes.  Right off the bat, your view of the world is reduced by about ninety-five percent.  Good binoculars offer a field of view of about eight degrees of arc.  Your eyes, with birder-enhanced peripheral vision, give you between 100 and 180 degrees of arc.  You bring binoculars to your eyes, you've just thrown away your greatest bird-finding advantage -- your ability to perceive the whole world in front of you.

I know I've found this to be true of my camera.  In fact, I've found that even though my distance vision is diminished without glasses, standing on my deck bare-eyed I am able to watch the entire yard, watch for the slightest motion or movement.  For me, it is these moments of stillness and receptivity that are among the most rewarding parts of birding. 

Pete Dunne is one of the most prolific and talented bird writers around -- his books include Pete Dunne's Essential Field Guide Companion, The Feather Quest, and the wonderful collection of essay/stories about raptors The Wind Masters.  The Art of Birding shows all his usual strengths.  For almost anyone, at any level, this book is a valuable trip back to the very beginnings of bird watching, a refresher course on what and where to look, and a guide to shifting our perspective. 

Yogi Bera once said that the secret to baseball was just to "hit it where they ain't".  The secret of birding then might be described as "look where they is".  And Pete Dunne will show us how.

(Books and Beast readers might also want to check out the latest post at Birdland West -- "A Flock of New Books for Birders" featuring the best of recent books on birdwatching, gardening and related topics.)

Writing for the Birds

 (The photos in this blog post -- except for book covers -- were taken by me, copyrighted by me, and can only be used with permission.)

I am standing at the living room window in the early morning (when I should be writing) sipping coffee and watching the yard come to life.  There is a bird feeder in the cherry tree by the deck, and every few seconds a tiny black-capped chickadee darts from a bush by the sidewalk, undulating in a quick wave, up and down like a dolphin swimming in the sea, and lands unerringly on the tiny plastic perch of the feeder.  They never seem to miss, even when the feeder is swaying in the breeze. And I never get tired of watching them, trying to imagine the very different world they inhabit, only a few feet away from me.   

  

The legendary science fiction editor John W. Campbell used to tell his writers (who included such future luminaries as Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein) to write an alien character "that thinks as well as a man, but not like a man".  My little songbirds, who don't share a common ancestor with me for something like a hundred and eighty million years, are as alien in their way as anything in science fiction.  Attempting to see through their eyes (which are sensitive to a much wider range of the spectrum than mine) stretches my imagination to its limits.

 

A Foray into the World of Animals and Humans

I get some help from Jakob von Uexküll -- a German baron born in 1864 -- a biologist and physiologist, with a deep interest in animal behavior--whose work would become the foundation for the imposingly named field of "biosemiotics" -- literally, the study of the signs and symbols of life.

At first glance, none of this -- chickadees or and old German scientist --  seems to have any relevance to the art of writing (or reading) fiction, but Jakob von Uexküll introduced a concept called the umwelt (um velt) which is invaluable not only in understanding my avian neighbors, but also in the creation of vivid fictional characters.

Imagine the chickadee again. The umwelt is the bird's subjective world. "We must first blow," Uexküll writes, "in fancy, a soap bubble around each creature, to represent the world which it alone knows ... When we ... step into one of these bubbles, the familiar meadow is transformed ... Many of its colorful features disappear, others no longer belong together.  A new world comes into being."  

The chickadees, for instance, can see in the ultraviolet -- they see patterns on plants and animals which are totally invisible to me.  They can very likely see the polarization of sunlight and detect directions from it.  They may even -- we know this is true of other songbirds -- be able to perceive the magnetic field of the Earth.  And what's more, they live in a world much more three dimensional than my own.  Where movement, for me, generally takes place on the surface of the world, chickadees are free to move in any direction.  They can fly. 

To get into the soap bubble of another creature, we must look at a few important elements.  What are they capable of perceiving? What is most important in their lives? And how do they act upon the world? These elements define the creature's umwelt or "self-world", and they are the levers which allow us to step into that world.  

Chickadees eat insects, seeds, berries.  They live in trees and they are, at least in this area, pretty much protected from predators.  They are too small and fast to be worth a hawk's time, they don't spend enough time on the ground to fall victim to cats very often.  As a result, they are bold, curious, almost fearless.  I have leaned over the rail of my porch and looked down into the eyes of a chickadee looking back at me over the distance of a few feet.  I am important in their world now because I take care of the feeders, but often the activity of humans, even very close to them, barely registers at all.  We are unimportant, mostly nonthreatening, and hence invisible.  

I have watched chickadees and hummingbirds share a single tree in my yard.  To us, it looks like they share a small space, but I suspect that their umwelts barely overlap.  The hummingbirds are interested in syrupy sweet nectar, from flowers and feeders, which in turn fuels their constant hunt for insects.  Small, incredibly fast, as maneuverable as dragonflies, and fiercely territorial, they are solitary where the chickadees are social, and so aggressive that Ancient Aztec warriors took hummingbirds as their symbol, and wore their bright feathers into battle.  As focused as the hummingbirds are -- they live always on the thin line of survival, where every calorie can be the crucial difference -- I wonder if the incidental chickadees even register on their perception -- any more than songbirds downtown register on the perception of busy humans.  

From the outside -- the perspective of an omniscient narrator, perhaps -- these creatures inhabit the same world.  But within their individual soap bubbles, what exists and what doesn't, what is important and what is not, what they care about and what they don't, those worlds could be totally different.

The same is true of our fictional characters.  I am fond of the omniscient perspective, the view of the Elizabethan novelist who wanted to show us all the levels of society and how they interacted, even when they were oblivious to each other.  In modern terms, it's the perspective of the ecologist, who can see how so many living things share the environment, even when they never perceive each other.  But as writers, we also have to be able to draw close, to get inside the soap bubbles, and see the world as the individual sees it.  

Imagining ourselves into the minds and lives of other creatures -- human, alien, or animal -- is the ultimate creative act.  It can be argued that the most important contribution of fiction -- and especially of the novel -- to human culture is exactly this, that it allows us to step outside our own limited experience and see the world from other viewpoints, in other times and places.  That it broadens and deepens our sense of fellowship with other creatures.  As storytellers, as readers, and as a civilization this is something we desperately need.

So we can fly with the chickadees.

(Books and Beast readers might also want to check out the latest post at Birdland West -- "A Flock of New Books for Birders" featuring the best of recent books on birdwatching, gardening and related topics.)

Feathers: The Evolution of a Natural Miracle by Thor Hanson

(Note: The bird photographs in this blog posting were taken by me, are copyrighted by me, and can only be re-used with my permission.)

Feathers:  The Evolution of a Natural Miracle, by Thor Hanson

 

"The true mystery of the world," Oscar Wilde said (sounding, unintentionally I'm sure, like a Zen teacher), "is the visible, not the invisible."  I think about that idea almost every time I watch birds.  A chickadee starts in a bush on the front edge of my yard, darts skyward, and then flies straight through the middle of the cherry tree -- through the close set branches, the thick spring leaves -- and out the other side.  It's something we see every day.  In fact, all too often, it's something we don't see at all.

And yet, it's a miracle.

Black-capped Chickadee

Forget, for a moment, the wonder of flight itself.  Think simply about what it takes for the chickadee to fly at full speed through that tree.  The precision control to fly through such tight spaces, avoiding all obstacles.  The speed with which eye and brain must process information, even in flickering, constantly changing light.  It's a feat that should take our breath away in awe.  Every time.

And the magic of birds is closely tied up with the secrets of their most distinctive feature:  feathers.  Most of us don't spend a lot of time thinking about feathers apart from the birds themselves, but Thor Hanson, a conservation biologist and author (his previous book was The Impenetrable Forest: My Gorilla Years in Uganda) has.  And the result is his new book Feathers: The Evolution of a Natural Miracle.  At the  risk of overusing the word, I have to say that the book itself is a kind of miracle too:  an enjoyable, well written popular science book that is not only neck deep in real, hands-on science -- from chemistry to evolutionary biology to acoustics and paleontology -- but also manages to take us to the quirky, off-beat places where the human fascination with feathers lives.  It's a delightful trip, and if I wanted I could probably write an easy, intriguing review just by listing some of the fascinating nuggets you'll stumble across in this book.  I'll try to resist that impulse.

Bird feathers can create color in two different ways, by pigment and by structural properties that effect the refraction of light.  Much of the vibrant blue of a Steller's Jay's color, for instance, is due to the refractory properties of the feathers, not just to pigment.

Hanson begins where all things in biology begin -- with evolution.  In 1861 a quarryman in Germany uncovered what would become one of the most famous fossils in the world  -- the ancient winged creature that scientists named Archaeopteryx.  When that fossil made its way to England, it sparked one of the most heated debates in the history of science.  On one side, Sir Richard Owen, Director of the natural history at the British Museum, the man who coined the word "dinosaur" and a staunch believer "species were created and altered only by the hand of God."  On the other was "Darwin's bulldog" Thomas Huxley.  On the Origin of the Species was only two years old, and the debate over evolution was front page news.  Owen flatly denied that  Archaeopteryx was any kind of intermediate step, claiming that it was "simply the earliest known example of a fully formed bird."  But Huxley was not convinced.  He undertook an ambitious study of avian anatomy, and answered Owen with a series of papers and lectures that showed Archaeopteryx similarities to both birds and reptiles.  "But he went further," Hanson writes, "identifying a small dinosaur ... Compsognathus longipes that resembled Archaeopteryx in everything but the feathers .... "  There at the very beginning of the debate, Huxley laid out the basis for what most scientists now believe is the inescapable conclusion -- birds are the descendants of dinosaurs, and specifically, of a class of bipedal dinosaurs called Theropods.

But the debate goes on.

A young Cooper's Hawk.

Hanson introduces us to Dr. Richard Prum, whose theory of the development of feathers, derived from his knowledge of how feathers grow, has become the framework for modern ideas of feather evolution. To Xing Xu, a Chinese paleontologist who has uncovered some of the most important links in the story of birds (and feathers):  Sinosauropteryx prima, the first fossil that showed, definitively, evidence of proto-feathers (dinofuzz) -- Caudipteryx zoui, also a theropod dinosaur, but with distinctive feathered hands and tail -- and many more.  And we meet the dissenters, like Alan Feducia, a professor at the University of North Carolina, the de-facto leader of an increasingly marginalized group who call themselves BAND (Birds are Not Dinosaurs).

Tiny songbirds, like these bushtits, are constantly faced with the dual challenges of staying warm and staying cool. 

But evolution is only part of the story.  Just as fascinating are feathers as they exist today, in all their diversity and wonder.  From insulating down to sensitive facial feathers that can read air currents with amazing accuracy to aerodynamic flight feathers as sophisticated as anything humans have designed.  Feathers are the most efficient insulating material in the natural world, far outstripping the abilities of skin, hair or scales.  For instance, a Golden Crown Kinglet, Hanson tells us, one of the smallest of songbirds, can survive in places where night time temperatures get as low as 17 degrees below zero (-27 C), and devotes the vast majority of its feathers (7 percent of its body weight) to insulation.  "The difference between the outdoor air temperature and the cozy space inside a kinglet's feather coat could be as large as an astonishing 140 degrees (Fahrenheit)  ...."  He goes on to note that hundreds of bird species live at least part of the year above the Arctic Circle, that Penguins incubate their eggs unprotected in the middle of the Antarctic winter, and that the Bar-Headed Goose flies over thirty thousand feet high in its migration over the Himalayas.  "At that altitude, the air temperatures and wind chill often combine to dip below -80 degrees Fahrenheit ... Like Kinglets, these birds rely on feathers to insulate their bodies against the elements."

There is much more to Hanson's book, and I can't possibly go into everything.  (The flip-side of feathers' insulating power is that birds, whose metabolic rates are much higher than mammals, have had to develop elaborate cooling systems to keep from overheating.)  He also shows us some of the ways humans have co-opted bird's feathers -- from fashion to the design of airplane wings to quill pens.

Feathers  is a book almost any bird person will love. 



Check out my most recent posting Newcomers:  Birds of Spring at our sister blog, Birdland West.

You can read more about the evolution of feathers in the recent National Geographic Article, here.

Ravens in Winter

 

 Ravens in Winter

In 1984 field biologist Bernd Heinrich posed an interesting puzzle:  Why was it that the Ravens around his retreat in Maine seemed to be sharing food, even the harshest periods of winter, with unrelated birds?  Ravens (Corvus Corax) are  more solitary creatures than their urban cousins the Crows.  Their uncharacteristically communal behavior struck Heinrich as "left-wing", and with a scientists' obsessive curiosity he set out to discover why.  Over the course of four years, spending his winter vacations in the frigid Maine woods (while his colleagues "tend to spend their sabbatical years in distant, exotic lands"), hauling carcasses up the mountain to use as bait, spending weeks in a small shack in sub-zero conditions, where he can nothing but observe all day long, and where any other movement or activity jeopardizes the experiment, he gradually gathered the observations that would help him solve his problem.  Along the way, he became interested in the remarkable birds of the corvid family -- how intelligent, truly, are crows and ravens?  Do they play?  How complex are the social relationships, despite the Raven's solitary reputation?

Ravens in Winter attempts to answer these questions, or at least to look objectively at the information available.  Chapters detailing Heinrich's dogged perusal of ravens alternate with chapters that more broadly review the literature of what is known about raven's and their cousins.  

Heinrich comes to the question of Raven intelligence with an admirably scientific skepticism:

...[D]espite the overwhelming force of consensus, there is surprisingly little objective evidence that can be used to compare the ravens' intelligence vs. that of other corvid birds.  Indeed, a review of the literature convinces me that no proof of the raven's singular intelligence has yet been published.  Instead, many of the anecdotes purporting to show this are significant only if is taken for granted at the outset.

This circular nature of the definition of "intelligence" is a problem of critical importance to ethnology -- and to other disciplines as well .  In sociology debates over intelligence tests have raged for decades -- how do we measure intelligence, and is there any way to do that independent of our own cultural biases?  In computer science, it arises when systems seem to exhibit behavior which, in humans, we would consider intelligent -- a chess playing program, for instance.  Is this really intelligence, or simply a mechanical imitation of intelligence?  And if it's not "real" intelligence, what is the missing element that makes it incomplete?  

Since Descartes, who considered animals, to be mere automations, devoid of the spark of soul or consciousness he believed was the  mark human intelligence, there are many who make the same claim about animals -- that the things they do are not real thought or intelligence.

Alan Turing, in a paper way back in 1950 (Computer Machinery and Intelligence) offered a methodological test for his field, to cut through all the philosophical debate:  he proposed a game in which a subject converses, via keyboard, with an several unseen partners.    If the subject cannot reliably tell humans from machines -- then the machines can be said to have passed.  In other words, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck .... If you can't tell a difference between the behavior of a machine and the behavior we consider intelligent in humans, then for all practical purposes there is no difference.  

As powerful as the Turing test is, as a thought experiment, it seems to rest on a number of assumptions that have never really been tested.   Since our definition of intelligence is based on ourselves, it is natural to assume that something else that is intelligent will behave in similar ways.  But that isn't necessarily true.  The science fiction editor John W. Campbell used to tell his writers, "Write me a creature that things as well as a man, but not like a man."  Would a computer, the product of an very different process of development than that which created us, embodied in different mediums and related to the world in very different ways, manifest intelligence in a very different form.  In other words, could it thinks as well as us, but not like us?

And could Ravens and Crows -- the product of an entirely different evolutionary line than us (we don't share a common ancestor since well before the Age of Dinosaurs), with a different brain structure and a orientation on the world (they fly -- their natural element is three dimensional, and their sensory apparatus is very different  than our own), manifest intelligence in a way we might not immediately recognize?

Sociologists love to argue about IQ tests, and whether they can really be fair when the cultural backgrounds of the test designers and the subjects are very far apart.  With animals, the gulf is even wider.  For instance, we tend to put a lot of stock in the idea of the "mirror test" -- certain animals can recognize themselves in a mirror, which implies they have a sense of self, a subjective identity.  However, the mirror test is deeply rooted in our visual means of apprehending the world.  A number of birds -- who are also visually oriented creatures -- including Macaws, parrots and corvids  have been reported to pass the mirror test, as can many primates.  But dogs cannot.  And yet dogs can clearly recognize many individuals, humans and canine, by scent.  If the mirror reflected scent, instead of light, I suspect that all dogs would be able to recognize themselves and almost no primates would.

Ravens in Winter is a fascinating portrayal of the world of ravens, their relationships and their behavior.  But it is also a wonderful portrait of how science really works in the field.  Heinrich takes us from his initial observations, which sparked curiosity, framing a hypothesis, designing experiments (which often involved hauling large carcasses up into the mountains to attract the ravens), gathering observations and evidence, discarding hypotheses, creating new ones, more observations -- and so on until finally the data began to make sense and a valid theory emerged.  It is one of the best descriptions I have read of the scientific method in action.  

Ravens in Winter is a must read book for students of animal behavior -- and or corvids in particular.  But it is also a book for all lovers of science and nature.

Related Post at Birdland West
Dog Days, Raven Nights