Read The Thing with Feathers Online
Authors: Noah Strycker
The Duluth snowy owl sighting was first reported on the local birding listserv mou-net. Snowy owl totals for the 2011–2012 invasion were based on thousands of reports archived on eBird.com. The
New York Times
story by Jim Robbins was published on January 22, 2012. I saw the Fern Ridge snowy owl on December 19, 2011. A snowy owl with chicks is painted on the wall of the Cave of the Trois-Frères in southwest France, along with other animals, where figures have been dated to about 13,000 B.C. Illinois birder Rick Remington photographed the encounter between the Chicago snowy owl and peregrine falcon. The 1,000 Washington snowy owls of 1916 are cited in the 2005 book
Birds of Washington
, edited by Terence R. Wahl, Bill Twiet, and Steven G. Mlodinow. The term
superflight
was first used by ornithologist Carl Boch to describe multispecies winter finch irruptions. Victor Shelford’s influential 1945 paper was titled “The Relation of Snowy Owl Migration to the Abundance of Collared Lemmings.” Studies of irruptive cycles for snowy owls have been mixed; for instance, Ian Newton (2002) reported a mean irruption interval of 3.9 years in eastern North America, but after their statistical analyses Paul Kerlinger et al. (1985) concluded, “We did not find evidence that snowy owl irruptions occur at regular 3- to 4-year periods.” The same paper suggested that weather may be a cause of snowy owl irruptions, as other hypotheses don’t seem to adequately explain or predict occurrences; nearly three decades later, the question remains unanswered. The Alberta study of snowy owl mortality was described in “Causes of Mortality, Fat Condition, and Weights of Wintering Snowy Owls” (Paul Kerlinger and M. Ross Lein, 1988). The Victoria Island snowy owl chicks were banded by David Parmelee. Karel Voous is quoted from the 1988 book
Owls of the Northern Hemisphere
. Mark Fuller, Denver Holt, and Linda Schueck conducted the pilot satellite tracking study of snowy owls in Barrow, Alaska, between 1999 and 2001. Snowy owls were tracked on sea ice by Marten Stoffel et al. in 2008 (“Long-Distance Migratory Movements and Habitat Selection of Snowy Owls in Nunavut”). Norman Smith works with Mass Audubon on the Logan Airport Snowy Owl Project; maps of satellite-tagged owl movements are posted on the Mass Audubon website (accessed March 2013). The April 1995
New Internationalist
magazine article about nomads was called “The Facts.” The “Out of Africa” theory of modern humans’ origin is generally accepted, though dates continue to change; most recently, Fernando Mendez et al. (2013) pushed back the first exodus to 338,000 years ago, exceeding previous estimates. Aki Nikolaidis and Jeremy Gray (2010) examined the DRD4-7R allele’s relationship to ADHD disorder; a 2013 paper in
The Journal of Neuroscience
by Deborah Grady et al. linked it to longevity; multiple studies have also linked the allele to novelty-seeking, though others questioned this finding; and its impacts on risk taking were reported in Camelia Kuhnen and Joan Chiao’s 2009 paper “Genetic Determinants of Financial Risk Taking.”
Elizabeth Jones at Costa Rica’s Bosque del Río Tigre Sanctuary and Lodge described her hummingbird dilemma during my delightful 2011 visit there and in a subsequent e-mail interview. Paul Kerlinger first popularized the comparison of hummingbird weights to postage stamps. Bee hummingbird measurements are in Felisa Smith’s “Body Size, Energetics, and Evolution,” in volume 1 of the 2008
Encyclopedia of Ecology
. Robert C. Lasiewski (1962) estimated the nonstop flying range of a ruby-throated hummingbird at 26 hours and 600 miles based on laboratory-measured calorie consumption. R. S. Miller and Clifton Lee Gass analyzed hummingbird predation and longevity in their 1985 article “Survivorship in Hummingbirds: Is Predation Important?” Eight-year-old broad-tailed hummingbirds were documented by William Calder and S. J. Miller in 1983, and the twelve-year longevity record is listed by the U.S. Geological Survey Patuxent Wildlife Research Center Bird Banding Laboratory. Bat falcon diets were published in 1950 by William Beebe—one of the past century’s most colorful naturalists and the subject of an entertaining 2006 biography (he died in 1962). The Nano Drone was described in a February 17, 2011,
Los Angeles Times
article by W. J. Hennigan. Robert C. Lasiewski and R. J. Lasiewski (1967) measured a maximum heart rate of 1,260 beats per minute in a blue-throated hummingbird. The Sierra Nevada hummingbird study was reported by Mark Hixon et al. in 1983. The billion-heartbeat rule is
very
generalized, but it summarizes an interesting trend; Herbert Levine (1997) described the inverse relationship of body size and heart rate, and found a “remarkably constant” lifetime mean of one billion beats in a variety of species. Pace of life was reported in a fascinating 1999 paper by Robert V. Levine and Ara Norenzayan, “The Pace of Life in 31 Countries,” and the 2007 study was conducted by Richard Wiseman for his book
Quirkology
. Gerald Mayr described the German hummingbird fossils in
Science
in 2004.
Anecdotes are from my three-month 2008–2009 field season with the Penguin Science project, a research collaboration among Oregon State University, PRBO Conservation Science (now known as Point Blue Conservation Science), H. T. Harvey & Associates, the U.S. Antarctic Program, and the National Science Foundation Office of Polar Programs in the Ross Island area of Antarctica. Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s quotes are taken from his excellent 1922 memoir,
The Worst Journey in the World
. Charles Darwin’s iguana-tossing experiment was chronicled in his 1839 book,
The Voyage of the Beagle
, and inspired David Quammen’s insightful essay and 1988 book,
The Flight of the Iguana
. Galápagos National Park regulations and tolerant Galápagos wildlife behaviors are described from my own experiences while living there in 2006. For an example of research using flight distance as an indication of fear thresholds, and a good synthesis of flight distance as it relates to fearfulness in animals, see Theodore Stankowich and Daniel Blumstein’s 2005 paper “Fear in Animals: A Meta-analysis and Review of Risk Assessment.” Leopard seal attacks were reported in a
National Geographic
news story by James Owen on August 6, 2003. The “tend and befriend” theory is attributed to Shelley Taylor at the University of California, first described in a 2000
Psychological Review
article and popularized by her 2002 book,
The Tending Instinct
. Robert Plutchik died in 2006 at age seventy-eight after a distinguished academic career, having published eight books and hundreds of articles; the emotional color wheel he developed in 1980 is still used today. Ivan Pavlov won a Nobel Prize in 1904 for his studies of dog saliva, and classical conditioning experiments are often called Pavlovian in his honor. Little Albert remains a well-known case study, though some suggest that John Watson exaggerated his results; for instance, see Ben Harris’s 1979 critique, “Whatever Happened to Little Albert?” “Low-road” and “high-road” fear pathways were described by neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux, author of several popular books on the human brain. Swiss neurologist Édouard Claparède performed the 1911 amnesia experiment. The quail study was described in “Mothers’ Fear of Human Affects the Emotional Reactivity of Young in Domestic Japanese Quail” (Aline Bertin and Marie-Annick Richard-Yris, 2004). The New Zealand robin study was described in “Rat-Wise Robins Quickly Lose Fear of Rats When Introduced to a Rat-Free Island” (Ian Jamieson and Karin Ludwig, 2012). Physiologist Paul Ponganis measured 500-meter emperor penguin dives at Cape Washington, Antarctica. The implications of penguin fear, based on Penguin Science project research, were summarized in a 2011
Science
article by Virginia Morell, “Why Penguins Are Afraid of the Dark.”
Aniruddh Patel was featured in
New York Times
articles on December 14, 2008, and May 31, 2010, and Snowball’s story has made the rounds of major media. I learned about manakins deep in the jungles of Tiputini Biodiversity Station in eastern Ecuador, where researchers are focusing on their dancing behaviors. Patel et al.’s paper, “Experimental Evidence for Synchronization to a Musical Beat in a Nonhuman Animal,”
and Adena Schachner et al.’s paper, “Spontaneous Motor Entrainment to Music in Multiple Vocal Mimicking Species,” were published in
Current Biology
in 2009. Patel went on to author a deep, scholarly book called
Music, Language, and the Brain
(2010), which argues that music and language are not independent and should be studied together. Steven Pinker’s “auditory cheesecake” hypothesis has attracted heavy criticism; while many evolutionary biologists explain music in terms of natural selection, its survival advantage remains unclear—except that it gives us pleasure (in a recent incarnation of this argument, Henkjan Honing calls music a “game” in his 2011 book,
Musical Cognition
). Human musical evolution is a complex subject; my main point, besides the inspiration of curiosity, is that our music and language may share more with parrots, and other animals, than we realize.
The world’s chickens have been counted by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the Global Livestock Production and Health Atlas, and other groups, though all totals are necessarily estimates. Per capita U.S. meat consumption is closely monitored by the Livestock Marketing Information Center. Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe’s 1921 dissertation was first translated into English in 1927, according to Porter Perrin, who reviewed the term “pecking order” in 1955. Schjelderup-Ebbe’s studies have been referenced by many—for instance in a 1988 Stanford essay, “Dominance Hierarchies,” by Paul Ehrlich et al. Colin Allen wrote an in-depth review of transitive inference in animals in a chapter of the 2006 book
Rational Animals?
Joseph Malkevitch investigated tournament graph theory in a featured essay for the American Mathematical Society called “Who Won!” H. G. Landau’s theorem was originally published in his 1953 article “On Dominance Relations and the Structure of Animal Societies.” Randall Wise’s red chicken contacts were reported in
Los Angeles Times
and
New York Times
articles in 1989, as well as in other media.
The full text of Lewis and Clark’s journals, totaling nearly 5,000 pages, is archived at lewisandclarkjournals.unl.edu (accessed March 2013). Lewis and Clark’s supply list is on the
National Geographic
website. H. E. Hutchins and R. M. Lanner (1982) documented nutcrackers caching up to 98,000 seeds in one season (often burying several seeds in the same cache). Nelson Dellis has been featured on CNN and Fox News, in
Forbes
and
The New Yorker
, and in other media. Joshua Foer wrote a fascinating and highly readable book about the U.S. Memory Championship called
Moonwalking with Einstein
(2012). Johannes Mallow’s records are listed on the World Memory Statistics website (world-memory-statistics.com; accessed March 2013). Stephen Vander Wall’s five hypotheses about cache recovery are described in his 1982 paper “An Experimental Analysis of Cache Recovery in Clark’s Nutcracker.” Vander Wall continues to research caching behavior in various species, wrote the 1990 book
Food Hoarding in Animals
, and is an associate professor at the University of Nevada, Reno. Paul Reber, a psychology professor at Northwestern University, estimated the human brain’s capacity at 2.5 petabytes in a
Scientific American
article on April 19, 2010.
Wired
mentioned in a February 2011 article by John Timmer that a single human brain could perform the calculations of all the world’s computers combined—a vague but interesting assertion. Martin Hilbert and Priscila López estimated the information contained in a single human’s DNA (not the brain) at 30 zettabytes (30,000 exabytes) in a 2011
Science
paper. The student vs. nutcracker study was mentioned by Richard Cannings in his 2007 book,
The Rockies: A Natural History
. Relationships between hippocampal volume and memory were discussed in a 2004 paper by Cyma Van Petten. Captive chickadee hippocampi were shown to shrink 23 percent in a 2009 Cornell University study by Tim DeVoogd and Bernard Tarr.
The Eurasian magpie mirror test is reported in Helmut Prior et al.’s 2008 paper “Mirror-Induced Behavior in the Magpie (
Pica pica
): Evidence of Self-Recognition.” Mirror tests with young children are described in Beulah Amsterdam’s 2004 paper “Mirror Self-Image Reactions Before Age Two.” The history of the word
magpie
is given in the
Funk & Wagnalls Wildlife Encyclopedia
(1974). Magpie superstitions are discussed in a 2008 BBC News Magazine article by Denise Winterman, “Why Are Magpies so Often Hated?” Sang-im Lee et al. inferred magpie phylogeny from mitochondrial DNA data in 2003. The paper by Won Young Lee et al. describing magpies recognizing human faces was published in
Animal Cognition
in 2011. The
Manchester Evening News
reported a magpie stealing car keys and tools in 2006, and
The Telegraph
reported a magpie stealing a woman’s engagement ring in 2008. Marc Bekoff described the magpie funeral (along with other examples of animal emotion) in his 2009 paper “Animal Emotions, Wild Justice, and Why They Matter: Grieving Magpies, a Pissy Baboon, and Empathetic Elephants.” A 2012
Time
magazine article by Jeffrey Kluger profiled loyalty and friendship in dolphins and other animals, empathy in rats was described in a 2011
Science
paper by Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal and coauthors, and mourning-like behavior was described in elephants in a 2006
Biology Letters
paper by Karen McComb and colleagues. Gordon Gallup, Jr.’s pioneering mirror tests with chimpanzees were published in a 1970
Science
paper. Studies of human self-recognition in patients with autism, schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s disease, and brain injuries are summarized from Gallup et al., “The Mirror Test,” in the 2002 book
The Cognitive Animal
. Jens Asendorpf et al. conducted the 1996 study showing children may be influenced by others’ behavior on the mirror test. The story of Phineas Gage was related in a 2010
Smithsonian
magazine article. Michael Benton (1990) gave the figure of 300 million years for divergence of birds and mammals in a
Journal of Molecular Evolution
paper. Robert Epstein et al. trained pigeons to pass the mirror test (without apparent self-recognition) and reported their results in a 1981
Science
paper.