The Thing with Feathers (2 page)

But if you look closely enough, many seemingly incredible bird feats have human counterparts, with interesting lessons. Cooperative nesting in fairy-wrens (see “
Fairy Helpers: When Cooperation Is Just a Game
”) helps illustrate why humans are usually nice to one another. The dazzling speed of hummingbirds (see “
Hummingbird Wars: Implications of Flight in the Fast Lane
”) serves as a warning about our own quickening pace of life. Snowy owls (see “
Snow Flurries: Owls, Invasions, and Wanderlust
”) confirm that not all who wander are lost. Even the domestic chicken (see “
Seeing Red: When the Pecking Order Breaks Down
”) has something to teach us about the natural pecking order.

This book may be about the bird world, but it’s also about the human world. Birds can behave in curious, flashy, and startling ways, but they seek the same basic things we do: food, shelter, territory, safety, companionship, a legacy. Each of these chapters explores a compelling bird behavior and focuses on a bird that embodies it. Here you’ll read one amazing bird story after another. Prepare to be blown away by, for example, the
memory of Clark’s nutcrackers (see “
Cache Memory: How Nutcrackers Hoard Information
”), which show us what the brain is capable of, and might inspire us to boost our own brainpower.

By studying birds, we ultimately learn about ourselves. Bird behavior offers a mirror in which we can reflect on human behavior. In
The Thing with Feathers
, the mirror is all around, glinting from the wingtips of hundreds of billions of the 10,000 species of birds that share this planet with us. Lucky for us, birds are everywhere. All we have to do is watch.

part one

BODY

HOMING

FLOCKS

SMELL

WANDERLUST

PACE OF LIFE

fly away home

HOW PIGEONS GET AROUND

O
n a recent birding trip, when I stopped at the remote outpost of Fields, in southeast Oregon, to grab a burger, I almost didn’t notice the pigeon in the parking lot. Fields is not much more than a store, an inn, and a stand of cottonwoods along an open-range highway in a zip code containing fewer than eighty residents. Several years ago, I watched an airplane land on the highway and taxi right up to the gas pump. The pilot had to be more careful of cows than cars. Fields doesn’t get much traffic.

The pigeon was quietly pecking around the pavement and scraps of tumbleweed just outside the station’s screen door, looking as though it maybe wanted to come inside. As I finished the last bites of my burger, something clicked. Here, a hundred miles from the nearest McDonald’s, any pigeon was a rarity.

“Hey, look, a pigeon!” I said.

Some other travelers also noticed it, and shooed the bird past the gas pump. It hardly moved until they walked right up to it.

“Seems pretty tame,” my dad and fellow birder said. “Wonder where it came from.”

“I bet we can find out,” I replied. “Check out the bands on its legs. I think it’s a racing pigeon.”

I had recently been researching homing behavior and my head was full of odd tales of transatlantic Manx shearwaters, a wonder dog named Bobbie, and a million-dollar pigeon race in South Africa. Now an actual racing pigeon had dropped out of the sky in the middle of nowhere, straight into my lunch break—a strange coincidence.

I grabbed my binoculars, passed through the screen door,
and began sidestepping in circles around the bird in the parking lot, angling to read its digits. If I could get the full number, I could find out who owned the bird and, possibly, how it ended up all the way out in Fields.

My dad was less subtle.

“Here, help me flank it,” he said as he rapidly closed in. The pigeon scooted away at the last second but stopped within a few feet and glanced back with a flirtatious look. My dad charged again, but the wily pigeon zigzagged out of reach. I started to take off my jacket to toss over the bird, but before I could do it, my dad made a bare-handed grab on his third try. The captured bird was nonchalant. It rested comfortably in my dad’s hands while staring pigeon-eyed at us, and seemed to expect to be fed.

It looked like a handsome city pigeon with some speckled white feathers on its head, and sported a green band on one leg and a red band on the other. The green one, which held a computer chip, was blank, but the red band was clearly inscribed:
AU 2011 IDA 1961
.

“Bingo,” I said.

After recording the number, we let the bird go free in the parking lot, where it went back to pecking windblown seeds out of cracks in the pavement. Was it lost? Or, like us, just refueling? It would be an interesting mystery to solve. We headed back inside to pay for our burgers.

Birds are amazingly good at navigation, so I thought the pigeon stood a fair chance of making it home. Racing pigeons are deservedly famous for their orienteering skills, but lots of birds have the same ability. I recalled the incredible story I’d heard about an experiment with Manx shearwaters in the 1950s.

“Hey, did you know that a shearwater once covered three thousand two hundred miles across the Atlantic to get home?” I said as we settled the check.

My dad is used to this sort of comment from me, but the waitress gave us a strange look.

—

JUST BEFORE WORLD WAR II,
a Welsh ornithologist, Ronald Lockley, captured two Manx shearwaters, a type of streamlined seabird, on Wales’s Skokholm Island, and flew with them by airplane to Venice to try an experiment. On arrival, Lockley walked to the nearest Italian beach and released his two birds. He wondered whether he’d ever see them again.

Fourteen days later, one of them turned up back in its burrow on Skokholm Island, not long after Lockley himself had returned to his home there. He was shocked. The black-and-white, football-sized seabird had traveled more than 930 miles, averaging at least 65 miles per day over mountainous terrain entirely unfamiliar to its kind. Manx shearwaters of this subspecies spend nearly their entire lives at sea, dine exclusively on fish and other marine creatures, and don’t normally inhabit the Mediterranean region at all; they reach land only to nest on rugged islands like Skokholm along the fringes of the wild northern Atlantic. A water route from Venice to Skokholm would have required a circuitous 3,700-mile passage southeast around the tip of Italy, westward past Spain and through the Strait of Gibraltar, and northward past Portugal and France, but this bird had apparently taken a more direct flight. Upon release, instead of heading for the open Mediterranean, it oriented in the opposite direction and disappeared
inland
, toward the Italian Alps—and, eventually, arrived home in Wales. Just as though it had a map and a compass.

Lockley was fascinated. He’d settled on Skokholm, a cliff-ringed haven little more than a mile in length, in the 1930s to breed and sell rabbits, but had quickly found a better living
writing about the island’s birdlife. He’d go on to publish more than fifty books and even won an Oscar for a documentary about gannets—another type of seabird—but is still best known for his experiments with Manx shearwaters and their incredible homing abilities. After the Venice test, he looked for an opportunity to send one even farther afield. A couple of birds packed by steamship to America did not survive the trip in good enough health to return, but when the American clarinetist Rosario Mazzeo visited Skokholm after the war ended, Lockley seized another chance. He convinced his friend to bring two shearwaters home on the plane, to be released in Boston.

Mazzeo’s own journey began with an overnight sleeper train from Wales to London. His little carton containing the pair of shearwaters, he later reported, “caused no little wonder and merriment to the people in the adjoining rooms, who could not understand the origin of the mewing and cackling sounds which came from my room in the late evening.” The next morning he took a long flight to the United States with the birds tucked under his seat—a trip that would be nearly impossible in today’s security age. Only one survived. Mazzeo was met by an airline employee, who escorted him in an official truck to the easternmost edge of Logan International Airport, where they carefully opened the carton and watched its remaining occupant stretch its wings, flutter into the air, and glide away toward Boston Harbor. When the shearwater reached the shore, it abruptly turned east and knifed toward the open Atlantic, where 3,200 miles of ocean separated it from home.

Twelve days, twelve hours, and thirty-one minutes later, Lockley found the shearwater, number AX6587, back in its burrow on Skokholm Island. The seabird had averaged 250 miles per day over the trackless Atlantic for nearly two weeks
straight. Mazzeo received a triumphant telegram addressed to Symphony Hall in Boston but didn’t get the full story until Lockley worked out the details. When the bird showed up at Skokholm so soon, Lockley was convinced that something had gone wrong; he figured Mazzeo had preemptively freed his shearwater in London. In fact, the friendly clarinetist had mailed a letter from Boston immediately after releasing his charge, but the bird outpaced even the postal service. Only when Mazzeo’s letter arrived in Wales, a day after the shearwater, did Lockley realize the incredible trip the bird had taken from America back to its nest in Europe.

—

THE WORLD ABOUNDS
with barely believable stories about animals finding their way home from strange places. Many involve pets. In 1923, a family from Oregon lost their dog, Bobbie, on a car trip to Indiana. After searching exhaustively, they returned home with heavy hearts only to be surprised when, six months later, Bobbie turned up on their doorstep in Oregon—recognizable by three scars and a missing tooth—with worn feet and a mangy coat, skinny and scrawny, having apparently walked 2,600 miles across the country in the dead of winter. Newspapers picked up the story, and Bobbie the Wonder Dog rocketed to instant fame; his family received hundreds of letters, keys to cities, medals, a jewel-studded collar, and a dog-sized bungalow. More than 40,000 people visited him at the Portland Home Show. Bobbie’s story was later published in a book, and he subsequently played himself in a silent film,
The Call of the West
. When he died, the mayor of Portland gave his eulogy, Rin Tin Tin laid a wreath on his grave, and his hometown of Silverton initiated an annual pet parade that continues more than eighty years later.

And then there’s the case of Ninja, an eight-year-old tiger cat whose family moved from Utah to Washington in 1996. When he was let outside for the first time at his new house in Seattle, Ninja jumped the fence and was never seen again—until more than a year later, when an identical-looking kitty with the same personality and same strange howl turned up at his original house in Utah, looking like he’d just “been through the war,” according to the neighbor who discovered him. Coincidence? Or did Ninja walk 850 miles back to his old home? The story was credible enough to be featured on an episode of the TV show
Nature
, along with Sooty, a cat who came back—not quite the very next day—after his family moved more than one hundred miles in England.

Some wild animals seem to have the same instincts. In the 1970s, the National Park Service relocated hundreds of misbehaving black bears in Yosemite, but no matter how far away they carried the sedated bears by helicopter, the animals kept stubbornly reappearing in their old haunts, causing park rangers to give up on relocation and institute a scare-tactic conditioning program instead. Smallmouth black bass, a fish native to eastern North America, have been shown to return to favorite pools after being dumped far from familiar tributaries within their river system. Even snails can find their way home: The typical English garden variety must be relocated more than 300 feet away or it will crawl right back to eat more of your lettuce.

But birds, with their ability to fly long distances and navigate along the way, are exceptional at returning home from unfamiliar places. Lockley’s Manx shearwaters are just one example. Even small songbirds can do it. When a group of researchers captured some white-crowned sparrows in Southern California and transported them to Louisiana, many returned
to the exact same wintering location in California the following year. The researchers flew some sparrows from California to Maryland, and those came back, too. Not to be outdone, the scientists transported yet another group of sparrows to Seoul, Korea, more than 5,600 miles across the Pacific Ocean from Southern California, where no white-crowned sparrow had ever been recorded. That group never made it home—either the birds fell in love with kimchi or, more likely, some physiological limit had finally been reached.

Pigeons are best known for this ability, partly because of the sport of pigeon racing. Routine pigeon races cover one or two hundred miles, but some official races are longer. In China, there is a race that forces the birds to fly about 1,250 miles (though this distance equates more to survival than fun for the pigeons, making the ethics of this event questionable), and there are anecdotes of pigeons homing successfully from even farther away, on journeys exceeding 2,000 miles. These are incredible feats of navigation, considering the birds have no information about the outward journey before they are stranded far from home.