The Thing with Feathers (32 page)
Read The Thing with Feathers Online
Authors: Noah Strycker
I observed great bowerbirds during a six-month field season at Mornington Sanctuary in northwest Australia (see the chapter titled “Fairy Helpers”). The great bowerbird with a toy soldier was photographed by Tim Laman and accompanied a 2010
National Geographic
feature about bowerbirds by Virginia Morell. Theft of colorful wire in great bowerbirds was studied and described by Natalie Doerr (2010). Richard Dawkins, author of the influential 1976 book
The Selfish Gene
, published
The Extended Phenotype
in 1982. John Endler’s 2012 paper “Bowerbirds, Art, and Aesthetics” appeared in
Communicative and Integrative Biology
. As he points out, the
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
has a helpful, in-depth discussion of the definition of art on its website, revised in 2012. John Endler et al.’s 2010 paper about bowerbird forced perspective appeared in
Current Biology
, with a 2012 follow-up by Laura Kelley and John Endler (“Male Great Bowerbirds Create Forced Perspective Illusions with Consistently Different Individual Quality”) concluding that this trait varies by individual. Denis Dutton’s book
The Art Instinct
was published in 2010. Jared Diamond authored a paper about bowerbirds and the evolution of aesthetics in
Nature
in 1982. His study of bowerbird style (with conclusions about culturally transmitted visual taste) was reported in his 1986 paper “Animal Art: Variation in Bower Decorating Style Among Male Bowerbirds
Amblyornis inornatus
.” Odoardo Beccari’s quote is taken from a chapter in volume 2 of Samuel Lockwood’s
Readings in Natural History
(1888), titled “The Bower Birds—Avian Aesthetics.” The chimpanzee painting story is well documented in a Museum of Hoaxes Web article called “Pierre Brassau, Monkey Artist, 1964.” Specific bowerbird taxonomy is unclear; these birds are thought to have descended from the crow family along with many other Australian birds, and are now perhaps most closely related to lyrebirds (Charles G. Sibley et al., 1984). Joah Madden described bowerbird brain sizes in his 2001 paper “Sex, Bowers, and Brains.”
I spent six months at the remote Mornington Sanctuary, a property of the Australian Wildlife Conservancy in interior northwest Australia, in 2010, as part of a multiyear study on purple-crowned fairy-wrens funded by the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, under the able direction of Michelle Hall. Results of this research were published in a 2012 paper by Sjouke Anne Kingma et al., “Multiple Benefits of Cooperative Breeding in Purple-Crowned Fairy-wrens.” I highly recommend Richard Dawkins’s classic 1976 book
The Selfish Gene
, which outlines the case for altruism as a means of furthering genetic legacy. The concept of kin selection can be traced to Darwin; more recently, people such as J. B. S. Haldane have computed its effects precisely, and author-scientists such as E. O. Wilson have explained it to the rest of us (see his 1980 book,
Sociobiology
). Game theory is the study of strategy, completely separate from biology, but there are fascinating parallels; John Maynard Smith and other biologists have used game theory to enhance our understanding of evolution, from sex ratios to territoriality and animal communication—and altruism. Mathematicians Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher originally formulated the prisoner’s dilemma in 1950, and political scientist Robert Axelrod reported on his iterated prisoner’s dilemma tournament in his 1984 book,
The Evolution of Cooperation
. Stephen Majeski argued that arms races are prisoner’s dilemmas in his 1984 paper, “Arms Races as Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma Games.”
Andrew Russell’s 2007 paper about maternal investment in superb fairy-wrens is titled “Reduced Egg Investment Can Conceal Helper Effects in Cooperatively Breeding Birds.” Martin Nowak’s 2011 book
SuperCooperators
explains his argument that cooperation should be considered a third tenet of evolution. The neuroscience of charity was reported in an article in
The Economist
of October 12, 2006, “Altruism: The Joy of Giving.” Judith Lichtenberg, a philosophy professor at Georgetown University, wrote an insightful essay titled “Is True Altruism Possible?” in an online
New York Times
opinion page of October 19, 2010.
Anecdotes are from the Carcass Island and West Point black-browed albatross colonies in the Falkland Islands in 2012, when I worked as an onboard ornithologist for three cruises to Antarctica with One Ocean Expeditions. I heartily recommend Carl Safina’s book
Eye of the Albatross
(2003), which paints a convincingly realistic portrait of life from an albatross’s perspective. Gray-headed albatrosses were documented circumnavigating Antarctica in a 2005
Science
paper by John Croxall et al. Brain scans of love-struck college students were analyzed by Andreas Bartels et al. (2001), who described three stages of love: lust, infatuation, and enduring love. Social monogamy rates in mammals and birds are given in the textbook
Animal Behavior
by John Alcock (ninth edition, 2009). Sexual monogamy rates of saltmarsh sparrows were measured by Chris Elphick et al. in 2009. The topic of bird divorce was explored by Susan Milius in an engaging 1998
Science News
article. Divorce rates have been studied in New Zealand’s red-billed gulls by James Mills. André Dhondt and Frank Adriaensen reported blue tit divorces in “Causes and Effects of Divorce in the Blue Tit
Parus caeruleus
” (1994). Human divorce rates are the subject of much quibbling, but overall trends are definite: In the United States, divorce rates tripled between 1950 and 1980, then flattened and declined, and about 40 percent of today’s new marriages are projected to end in divorce. David Anderson has studied divorce in Nazca boobies, reporting a 38 percent annual rate (“Serial Monogamy and Sex Ratio Bias in Nazca Boobies,” 2007). Pierre Jouventin et al. reported a 0.3 percent divorce rate in wandering albatrosses from the Crozet Islands in a 1999
Animal Behavior
paper. Genevieve Jones documented an 18 percent extra-pair paternity rate (illustrating the difference between social and sexual monogamy) in wandering albatrosses in 2012, after an earlier genetic study had estimated a 10 percent extra-pair paternity rate in 2006. The oldest known albatross is a female Laysan albatross named Wisdom, who, as of 2013, was still raising chicks at age sixty-two; John Cooper et al. reported a wandering albatross estimated by band recovery to have been at least a half-century old in 2001, noting that “demographic studies need to continue for several more decades” before we learn how long they might live in the wild. Martin Gardner, in
The Annotated Ancient Mariner
, points out that Samuel Taylor Coleridge probably didn’t realize just how big an albatross is; a flopping twenty-pound bird with a twelve-foot wingspan wouldn’t so much drape around a sailor’s neck as drag heavily on the ground. Not all metaphors should be taken literally.
INDEX
The page numbers in this index refer to the printed version of this book. The link provided will take you to the beginning of that print page. You may need to scroll forward from that location to find the corresponding reference on your e-reader.
acorn woodpeckers,
224
African gray parrot,
138
aggression
chickens,
148
,
149
,
158
,
159
hummingbirds,
91
–92,
97
–100
mourning doves,
253
Nazca boobies,
254
and reflected image,
195
–97
skuas,
254
albatrosses
affectionate behaviors,
258
–59,
262
,
263
aura of romance and spirituality,
247
black-browed albatross,
259
–63
courtship dance,
255
–56
distances flown,
247
–48
egg size and weight,
257
extra-pair paternity,
254
Falkland Islands colonies,
259
–61
gray-headed albatross,
247
Laysan albatross,
247
–48
life span,
256
–57
lifetime mating and loyalty,
248
,
254
,
256
–58
nesting process,
256
–58,
261
sleep during flight,
248
solitude,
255
,
258
wandering albatross,
248
,
254
–56
wingspan,
248
,
262
Albert’s swarm,
42
altruism.
See
cooperative behavior; fairy-wrens
art
by animals,
217
–18
for creative expression and communication,
208
,
212
creative ownership,
219
definitions,
208
–9,
210
,
212
,
218
,
219
forced perspective,
211
as human endeavor,
213
,
219
in mind of creator,
218
natural-selection theory,
208
,
213
–14,
216
See also
bowerbirds
Art Instinct, The
(Dutton),
213
–14
Attenborough, David,
51
Audubon, John James,
53
,
57
,
63
Axelrod, Robert,
231
–33
Bachman, John,
53
–54,
55
–56,
63
Barnes, Richard,
30
bat falcons,
94
Beccari, Odoardo,
216
–17
bee hummingbirds,
93
Bird Behavior
(Suarez and Gallup),
123
Bird Lovers Only rescue shelter,
130
Birmingham roller pigeons,
15
black-billed magpies,
194
black-browed albatrosses,
259
–63
black vultures,
57
,
63
blue tits,
253
Boids computer simulation,
34
–35