Understanding Bird Behavior: An Illustrated Guide to What Birds Do and Why

225 Pages·2020·40.208 MB·English

by  Wenfei Tong

UNDERSTANDING
BIRD BEHAVIOR
AN ILLUSTRATED GUIDE TO WHAT BIRDS DO AND WHY
Copyright © 2020 UniPress Books Limited  For my parents
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Published in the United States and Canada in 2020 by Cover design by Princeton University Press
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 
Great egrets fighting in midair.
UNDERSTANDING
BIRD BEHAVIOR
AN ILLUSTRATED GUIDE TO WHAT BIRDS DO AND WHY
WENFEI TONG
WITH A FOREWORD BY BEN C. SHELDON
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON AND OXFORD
A flock of yellow-headed blackbirds.
CONTENTS
6 FOREWORD
8 INTRODUCTION
12 1 FINDING FOOD
48 2 A SOCIAL BIRD
82 3 COURTSHIP
118 4 FAMILY LIFE
152 5 DEALING WITH DANGER
188 6 COPING WITH CLIMATE
216 SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY
220 INDEX
224 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

FOREWORD
BIRDS SEEM, AT FIRST SIGHT, a living paradox of adaptability.
Compared to any other class of animals, they are remarkably
invariant. We don’t need much information to learn what a bird is:
they all have two legs, two wings (even if these are sometimes tiny
and non-functional), a beak with which they manage all of their
dietary requirements, and feathers. Compare this similarity in body
plan with the diversity shown by mammals, or any other class of
vertebrates. In other aspects of their morphology, birds are also
remarkably invariant. The range in size from the smallest (bee
hummingbird) to the largest (ostrich) species of bird seems
impressive, but it is dwarfed by the range in mammals from shrew
to blue whale, or in fish from dwarf pygmy goby to whale shark.
Equally, birds seem boringly similar in that they all lay eggs,
compared to the diversity of reproductive systems in reptiles,
fishes, amphibians, and even mammals.
Despite this limited variation, birds exploit a wider range of the
biosphere than any other animal class, with records of birds from
the North and South Poles, ranging across all of the world’s oceans,
breeding on the remotest islands, and found in the hottest and
driest deserts. Alpine choughs have been recorded breeding at
altitudes of over 20,000 feet (6,000 meters) in the Himalayas, while
house sparrows, which live in close association with human
settlements worldwide, have been recorded in the UK breeding
2,100 feet (640 meters) underground in a Yorkshire coal mine,
subsisting on crumbs provided by miners. Emperor penguins have
been logged diving to 1,800 feet (550 meters) in Antarctic oceans,
and Ruppell’s vultures reported at altitudes of over 6.8 miles (11 km),
higher than many airplanes.
The key to this remarkable success and global distribution, despite
all birds being based on very much the same body plan, is often
said to be the remarkable flexibility that the evolution of feathers
afforded early birds. While this is one perspective, morphological
adaptations are only part of the story, and a limited part, at that,
6 FOREWORD
without behavioral adaptations to exploit them. Birds share many
features with us that have made them wonderful subjects for
understanding evolution, diversity, and behavioral adaptation.
Many species are conspicuous, and most active during daylight
hours; vision and hearing are key sensory modes that birds exploit
in communication, just as we do. Most birds even have reproductive
life histories rather like ours: a pair construct a nest (home), and
rear a family over an extended period. In some cases, there are
even “divorces” and the avian equivalent of extra-marital affairs.
This book is a dazzling tapestry woven of stories of the many
ways in which bird behavior enables us to understand adaptation.
Wenfei Tong’s lively prose, scattered with personal anecdotes and
experiences, weaves a compelling picture, mixing classic examples
with the very latest research findings, which continue to expand
our knowledge of the diversity and richness of bird behavior.
Remarkable adaptations described here come from exotic and
extreme environments, but also from birds that will be familiar to
the urban birdwatcher worldwide. I hope that this diversity and
accessibility will inspire a new generation of research in this area.
BEN C. SHELDON
FOREWORD 7
INTRODUCTION
A CASCADE OF LIQUID NOTES made me look up from the gray
New York street to admire an iridescent, green and purple bird with
tiny white arrowheads highlighting the tips of each glistening
feather. The European starling is so widespread it can easily go
unappreciated, but this bird exemplifies much of what this book
is about—from why birds behave the way they do, to how their
interactions with each other and with humans inspire and influence
our view of life.
European starlings appear repeatedly in this book, partly because
they feature so much in both art and science. Shakespeare’s only
known reference to the species, in Henry IV, Part I, is to the
starling’s ability to mimic almost anything. There are scholarly
speculations, including a long essay by biologists who specialize
in the study of birdsong, about how Mozart and his pet starling
inspired each other musically. We do know that Mozart loved his
little “joker,” going as far as to write an elegy to the bird when it
died. European starlings are so tractable, adaptable, and social
that they are a beloved species for biologists studying everything
from language, to economic decision-making, and to collective
animal motion.
NATURE VIA NURTURE
When you watch a bird constructing an intricate nest or screaming
in alarm at a hawk, you might well wonder how it “knows” what to
do and when. In fact, most bird behavior is a combination of innate
neural hardwiring, and constant adjustments and reprogramming
in response to its environment. For instance, a young bird may be
predisposed, through generations of natural selection, to emit a
certain sound when alarmed. However, it must learn how to refine
the alarm call and when to sound it by observing adults attacking a
predator. A European starling has the capacity to produce a perfect
rendition of a red-tailed hawk’s scream, or “I love you” in multiple
human languages, but only if it is exposed to those sounds.
8 INTRODUCTION
Above Above
I watched these lesser masked weavers There are few sounds that so evocatively
constructing their nests every day on a epitomize a particular landscape as the
friend’s farm in Zambia. This male is putting song of the western meadowlark, which
the finishing touches to its nest. speaks to me of Big Sky Country in the
American West.
AESTHETICS, ANTHROPOMORPHISM, AND AMORALITY
To what extent can humans and birds really identify with and
understand each other? This depends rather a lot on the
individuals in question, but birds have a lot to teach us in terms of
how other species have evolved to perceive the world. European
starlings often make more rational (as defined by economic theory)
decisions than humans when foraging, as discussed in chapter 1.
INTRODUCTION 9