Bird Sense (28 page)

Resolute, on Cornwallis Island in Canada’s Nunavut, is one of the most remote settlements in the world. Almost everyone who conducts research in the Canadian High Arctic arrives here first by jet, then takes a light plane or helicopter to their final destination. As the jet descends, I see on either side of the runway the remains of aircraft whose landing or take-off failed. This is my stressful introduction to the Arctic. But worse awaits. Far from fulfilling my romantic notion of the far north, I’m disappointed by the desolate, muddy landscape, by the all-pervading smell of aviation fuel and, most of all, by the casual way the local Inuit use birds for target practice.

My arrival in mid-June coincides with the spring thaw and on that first day I notice a pair of brent geese by a frozen pool: black silhouettes against an icy background, waiting for the snow to melt and the opportunity to breed. The next day I drive past the frozen pool again, but am saddened to see that one of the geese has been shot. Beside its lifeless form stands the bird’s partner. A week later I pass the same pond again, and the two birds, one live and one dead, are still there. I left Resolute that day so I’m afraid I don’t know how long the bird stood vigil over its dead partner.

Is the bond that kept those two individuals together in life – and in death – an emotional one, or is it simply an automatic response that programmes birds like geese to remain close to their partner at all times?

Charles Darwin was in no doubt that animals like birds and mammals experienced emotions. In
The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals
(
1872
) he recognises six universal emotions – fear, anger, disgust, surprise, sadness and happiness – to which others later added jealousy, sympathy, guilt, pride and so on. Effectively, Darwin envisaged a continuum of emotions from pleasure to displeasure. Most of Darwin’s book is about humans, and his own children in particular, whose facial expressions he studied in detail. Darwin also gained tremendous insights from his pet dog – and dogs, as every owner knows, make their feelings very obvious.

Like some of his predecessors, Darwin considered the vocalisations of birds an expression of their emotions. The sounds birds make under different circumstances have a quality that we identify with – harsh when aggressive, soft when directed to a partner, or plaintive when grabbed by a predator – making it easy for us to be anthropomorphic. In a similar vein, because we find birdsong enjoyable, it was long assumed that birds felt the same way and therefore sang for pleasure, either their own or their partner’s.
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At one level this is completely anthropomorphic. On the other hand, because we share both some ancestry and many sensory modalities with birds, it is just possible that we share a common emotionality.

Emotions often seem to run high when birds and their offspring interact. Parent birds care for their chicks, feeding them, allopreening them, removing their faeces and protecting them from predators. The injury-feigning display performed by ground-nesting birds like plovers and partridges provides a dramatic example of parental protection. Confronted by a fox or human, the parent bird drags one wing across the ground, creating the impression of injury and drawing the predator away from the more vulnerable chicks. Once considered to be a sign of parental devotion and intelligence, this distraction behaviour is now regarded as instinctive and assumed to be devoid of any emotional input, motivated simply by the conflicting tendencies of the need to stay close to the offspring and to escape from the predator.
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Even so, the way that parent birds protect their young, or the way chicks and ducklings follow their mother and run to her in times of danger, often makes it look as though they are tied together by an emotional bond. There is certainly a bond, but whether it is an emotional one is less clear. The bond is largely the result of the young bird imprinting on its mother soon after it emerges from the shell. Yet when chicks are hatched in an incubator, they will imprint on
anything
they first see, including inanimate objects such as a boot or a football. When this occurs we interpret the behaviour completely differently and ask ourselves how a young bird could be so stupid – how could it be emotionally tied to a boot or a ball? Yet there is an entirely logical explanation for this apparently ‘stupid behaviour’.

Natural selection has favoured chicks that imprint on the first thing they see, for normally that is the mother, and under normal circumstances that works perfectly well. Rearing a chick with a boot or a ball, we are merely exploiting a simple inbuilt rule: follow the first thing you see. A cuckoo chick exploits the care of its foster parents in exactly the same way, exploiting their rule to feed anything that begs inside their nest. We might just as easily ask how the foster parents could be so stupid as to be duped by the young cuckoo.

It is clearly possible to account for parental and other behaviours without imputing emotions, but how certain can we be that birds and other animals don’t experience emotions as we do?

Before considering the issue of whether birds experience emotions, I need to give you a bit of background. We’ll start in the
1930
s which, despite the promising start made by Darwin, is when the study of animal behaviour really began to take off. Researchers in North America adopted a hard-nosed psychological approach to behaviour, focusing mainly on captive animals and training them to tap at keys for rewards or to avoid punishment. For the ‘behaviourists’, as these researchers became known, animals were little more than automata. This is paradoxical, for the behaviourists’ rationale relied on animals being able to respond to pain and to appreciate rewards. Most of today’s animal behaviour students view the behaviourists’ approach with disdain because it seems so artificial, but it did reveal a great deal about the cognitive capacity of animals. Pigeons, for example, were found to be at least as good as humans at memorising and categorising visual images. At the time, this seemed bizarre because pigeons appeared to be so inept at other tests, but when it was later realised that pigeons rely on visual maps to navigate, as we have seen, it made perfect sense.

The Europeans adopted a more naturalistic approach to behaviour, studying animals in their natural environment, creating the discipline of ‘ethology’. Their initial focus was on what
caused
behaviour – what is the stimulus that triggers a behavioural response? A famous example from that era is the way a herring gull chick pecks at the red spot on its parent’s beak, stimulating it to regurgitate food. Essentially, the ethologists were studying communication – what are animals saying to each other and what motivates them to behave in certain ways?

Even though the ethologists’ approach was more naturalistic, it was also objective for they were desperate to avoid the trap of anthropomorphism, as Niko Tinbergen, one of ethology’s main architects, explains in the introduction to
The Study of Instinct
(
1951
):

Knowing that humans often experience intense emotions during certain phases of behaviour, and noticing that the behaviour of many animals often resembles our ‘emotional’ behaviour, they conclude that animals experience emotions similar to our own. Many go even farther and maintain that emotions . . . are causal factors in the scientific meaning of the word . . . This is not the method we shall follow in our study of animal behaviour.

This view persisted well into the
1980
s when researchers were ‘. . . advised to study the behaviour rather than attempting to get at any underlying emotion’.
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Some, however, like the eminent biologist Don Griffin, whom we have met already, were confident enough to challenge this view. His book
The Question of Animal Awareness
, published in
1976
, was the first seriously to address the issue of animal consciousness and understand the ‘mind’ behind the behaviour.
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Griffin’s book was greeted with widespread derision, partly, as one colleague said, ‘because his critics continue to define consciousness in a way that excludes the possibility that we can find out if it exists in animals’.
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Nonetheless, throughout the mid-
1970
s and into the
1980
s, there was a groundswell of interest in animal awareness fuelled largely by increasing concern over the issue of sentience and welfare in non-humans.
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Emotions, feelings, awareness, sentience and consciousness are all difficult concepts. They are tricky to define in ourselves, so is it any wonder they are difficult in birds and other non-human animals? Consciousness is one of the big remaining questions in science, making it both an exciting but also a highly contentious area of research.
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Defining exactly what we mean by ‘consciousness’ or by ‘feelings’ is problematical, but nothing compared with the difficulty of trying to imagine how the mere firing of neurons can create a sense of awareness, or feelings of discomfort or euphoria.

These difficulties have not stopped researchers from trying to understand the emotional life of birds and other animals, but the lack of a clear conceptual framework has resulted in something of a free-for-all. Some researchers, for example, believe that birds and mammals experience the same range of emotions as we do. Others are more conservative, arguing that only humans experience consciousness, so humans alone are capable of experiencing emotions. Controversy is a normal part of science, and it tends to be greatest when there’s much at stake. Consciousness is a major challenge, which means that this is an exciting time to be trying to understand the kinds of feeling birds and other animals experience. In humans, consciousness integrates the different senses. I have no doubt that the senses of birds are integrated as well, and that this integration creates feelings (of some sort) that allow birds to go about their daily lives, but whether they create consciousness as we understand it remains unknown. We have made a lot of progress in the last twenty years and the more we find out, the more likely it seems that birds do have feelings. But this is difficult research: difficult, but potentially very rewarding, for by gaining a better understanding of birds, whose lives are similar in many ways to our own – in terms of being predominantly visual, basically monogamous and highly social – we stand to gain a better understanding of ourselves.

Biologists, psychologists and philosophers have argued over the issues of consciousness and feelings for years, so I cannot hope to resolve them here. Instead, I shall use a very simple approach that allows us to think about what might be going on in a bird’s head. The approach is based on the idea that emotions have evolved from basic physiological mechanisms that, on the one hand, allow animals to avoid harm or pain and, on the other, allows them to obtain things that they need, a ‘reward’, such as a partner or food.
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Imagining a continuum, with displeasure and pain at one end and pleasure and rewards at the other, provides a good starting point from which to look at emotions.

Anything that upsets an animal’s normal equilibrium is likely to be stressful. To put it another way, stress is a symptom of thwarted emotions. Hunger is a primary feeling that motivates us to seek food and failure to obtain it, especially in the long term, results in stress. Avoiding predators is what many animals spend much of their life doing, and being chased by a predator is stressful. Birds respond to stress by releasing the hormone corticosterone from the adrenal glands (located at the ‘head’ end of the kidneys in the abdomen) which in turn triggers the release of glucose and fat into the bloodstream, and provides the bird with a pulse of extra energy to minimise the impact of the stressful event. The stress response is therefore an adaptive one – it is designed to promote survival. However, if the stress is persistent the response can become pathological, resulting in loss of body weight, down-regulation of the immune system, a general decline in health and a complete loss of interest in reproduction.

The guillemots that have played such an important role in my research breed at exceptionally high densities, and the close proximity of neighbours is the key to their breeding success since it enables them to avoid attacks on their eggs and young from gulls and ravens. A phalanx of guillemot beaks can deter most predators, but to be effective the birds have to be tightly packed together. Guillemots breed at exactly the same tiny site just a few centimetres square, year after year – sometimes for twenty years or more. Not surprisingly, they get to know their immediate neighbours very well, and specific relationships develop – friendships, possibly – mediated by allopreening. Sometimes these friendships pay off in an unexpected way. Occasionally, as a greater black-backed gull attempts to take guillemot eggs or chicks, I have seen an individual guillemot rush from the back of the group to attack the gull. This is an extremely risky venture since these huge gulls are quite capable of killing adult guillemots.
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