The Feather Orchestra

Everyone knows that birds sing, but what about the ones that play instruments? After to listening to half an hour of recordings of the snipe’s winnowing tailfeather sounds the other night, my mind turned to all the other birds I know who produce music with their feathers instead of their voices. The first to come to mind was the Mourning Dove, whose whistling wingbeats I have often welcomed as the first notes of an early morning as they shoot like a volley of arrows over the empty street. The choppy whistling of a startled dove seems to act as a predator warning alarm to other doves, as well as any other birds in the immediate area; cardinals and chickadees that hear recordings of dove wing-whistles are much slower to return to a feeding ground than if surprised in any other way.

Tattletale.

The second birds I thought of were the hummingbirds; back in my California days, I would watch Anna’s Hummingbirds performing mating displays over the San Francisco heath, their flared tail feathers vibrating stiffly to produce a distinctive chirp as they divebombed the ground like young show-off stunt pilots.

Snipe Hunt

As a young cub scout going away to camp, my father and grandparents warned me against a prank the older scouts might play on me. “Never go on a snipe hunt,” I was warned. As far as I could gather, it was a fool’s errand of sorts: older boy scouts would suggest to us rookies that we chase the snipe, a bird that was nearly impossible to find, never mind catch. Great glory would go to the boy who caught the elusive snipe, we’d be told. But we should resist this seemingly honorable quest, for the snipe, as the bullies would describe it, could never be captured because it did not exist. The snipe hunt would inevitably end with us WeBeLos lost in some swamp while the smug Tenderfoots raided our candy stash.

I never was sent on a snipe hunt, but the warning left me with the impression that the snipe was, in fact, mythological. (I believed the same about gypsies until a trip to Europe at age 16.) This was no doubt reinforced by my poor recollection of Lewis Carroll’s jabberwockese poem The Hunting of the Snark, a short farce about a beast that is hunted by diverse characters but found by none. At some point, I misremembered The Hunting of the Snark as The Hunting of the Snipe, which seemed like an equally nonsensical title.

I don't exist. I was never here. Got it?

But there is a genuine animal behind the never-seen cryptid “snipe,” and it is almost as elusive. Snipes are wading shorebirds, most of which are part of the Scolopacidae family with the woodcocks, which they also resemble in so many ways: the cryptic coloration that gives them excellent camouflage against the rushes and pebbles of their home, the high-set eyes, the long bill for probing for worms and crustaceans below the muck. Snipes are animals that are built to disappear. If camouflage fails, the snipe will escape danger with a flight pattern so erratic and zigzagging that hunters find them almost impossible to take down. Only a supremely skilled sharpshooter would be able to both find and finish a crafty snipe with mere bullets; hence, the origin of the “sniper.”

Rosie the Riveter

Chick flick or no, you cannot deny the greatness of the 1992 film A League Of Their Own. It’s a comedy, a history, and one of the best baseball films of all time. It’s got memorable lines (“There’s no crying in baseball!”), memorable characters, an all-star cast, and is singularly responsible for starting my lifelong crushes on both the statuesque red-headed Amazon genius Geena Davis and the totally underrated tomboy hottie Lori Petty. More importantly, it’s the only movie I know that tells the story of American women fulfilling traditionally male roles during World War II, a fairly significant turning point in the feminist movement.

Also, Madonna did not sing.

I bring it up because I was recently discussing both the movie and the movement around the campfire with a co-worker. Later in the evening, another co-worker and I were discussing birds, and he told me an incredible story about chickadees. I knew that chickadee flocks work a little like wolf packs, with a few mated pairs in an alpha-beta hierarchy, plus the occasional floating loner. Usually, the death of an alpha male or female means that the beta male or female moves up the ladder to take his or her place in the alpha marriage. But according to my friend, this is not always so simple. He watched a flock of banded chickadees for a year, and noticed something peculiar: the alpha female lost her mate over the winter, and in the spring, the alpha female was singing male songs. What’s more, she passed over the beta male in favor of a socially less-desirable floater for a mate, and whenever the new husband would try to sing, the alpha female would fly over and knock him off his perch. Clearly, once she had gotten a taste of the male chickadee lifestyle and the power that confers, she was reluctant to part with it.

And he was reluctant to admit he kind of liked it.

Between the discussion of the WWII female factory workforce, A League Of Their Own, and the chickadee story, I got to wondering: what other bird species are there in which the female wears the proverbial pants? I know that in some species, male birds take on traditionally female roles, such as the egg-incubating male ostrich. And in others, the females are showier than the males; when Belted Kingfishers go to prom, it’s the ladies who wear the cummerbund. But to see a true display of gender-bending, you need to travel to the Arctic Circle to see the breeding grounds of the phalaropes.

"Don't worry, I've also never heard of me."

Long-Distance Relationship

When you are a child, you imagine animals pairing off neatly, like Noah’s menagerie coupling and marching up the gangplank to the chapel of bestial matrimony. Lovebirds are joined at the hip like a tween romance, and two swans form a perfect heart-shape with the teacup-handle arcs of their necks. Then you grow up, take a few biology courses, and discover that everything you thought was wrong. To your dismay, you realize that animals, even the kind that seem to exist in a monogamous marriage of sorts, cheat on one another constantly. Lovebirds get a little action on the sly; cuckoos can be cuckolded; monkeys can be real swingers; owls can get a little extra loving after midnight; house sparrows can be homewreckers; even swans, those regal symbols of romantic love swimming atop a wedding cake, are less backyard birds than backdoor men. In the avian world, it’s estimated that 90% of bird couples are socially monogamous (as opposed to 7% in mammals), but of those, 90% are sexually non-monogamous. Long under the spell of prudish human social norms and presuming fidelity among animals, scientists now seem to revel in revealing the promiscuity of the animal kingdom. But if polyamory is the true norm, that makes the monogamous animals the true weirdos, and therefore worth a closer look-see. What is the biological root of monogamy?

Dads with shotguns?

Without cracking open the scientific Ark of the Covenant that question implies, or the world’s largest can of worms that is human sexuality, let’s just talk about the birds. (And, this time, not the bees.) Can anything be said of that thin sliver of avifauna that is both sexually and socially monogamous? Yes, it seems. Most of the few birds that are both socially and sexually monogamous do it for the same reason many married couples do: for the kids. These are birds that live in such a hostile habitat that it takes every ounce of parental care to nourish their chicks. In other words, the parents would cheat on each other; they just don’t have the time or energy.

Not tonight, honey. I've got a *zzzzzzzz*

Seabirds in rocky, windy, or icy climes — like Emperor Penguins — make up the majority of sexually monogamous pairs, but one type of bird creates a hostile habitat for itself specifically so it cannot engage in extra-marital canoodling. That’s because in this species, the female is literally imprisoned behind a wall. It’s the Monteiro’s Hornbill of Namibia, and it is a master mason on the level of an Edgar Allen Poe antagonist. A mated pair of hornbills will scope out a suitable neighborhood to nest, preferably a stand of old-growth forest with large cavities in the trees. The holes may have been made by a fallen branch, or may have been carved out by a woodpecker. But however it’s made, it should be large enough for the female to enter and sit comfortably. She chooses carefully, because she’s going to be inside for a very long time.

Also, how are the schools?

Dead Reckoning

“It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,” wrote Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking Glass. But it’s not true when that backwards-thinking memory is spectacular. Those few with truly eidetic memories, also called photographic memories, have mixed feelings about the power, but there’s no arguing that the ability isn’t incredible. Witness Stephen Wiltshire, an autistic savant and architectural artist who can draw an entire city skyline from memory from just one helicopter ride, or a cathedral after a glance. Or remember the late Kim Peek, the inspiration for Dustin Hoffman’s character in Rain Man, who was estimated to have the complete content of 12,000 books committed to memory. Truly, memory is the library of the mind.

Then there are more or less fortunate people with hyperthymesia, or perfect autobiographical memory. Instead of memorizing the names and numbers of everyone in the phonebook, a person with hyperthymesia can recall with unblinking clarity everything they’ve ever experienced in their life. There have only been six documented cases of hyperthymesia in the world, but in each case, the patient can remember every detail of every day they’ve lived: what color shirt they wore, the faces of people who passed them in traffic, the arbitrary shapes of clouds. Every slight, every embarrassment, every victory, every heartbreaking moment. Forgetfulness is the gardener of memory, and hyperthymetics live in an unweeded wilderness of places, times, and emotions. In Jorge Luis Borges’ short story Funes el memorioso, the author invents a character with such a remarkable memory that he can relive a previous day’s events in real time, which, of course, takes an entire day to do. Funes is cursed by the inability to understand abstractions; able to remember absolutely every experience in crystal clear detail, he cannot understand the need to generalize. Poetry and dreams are beyond him. Every moment in the past is just as real to him as the current one, and his life one unbroken and contiguous chain of events interrupted only by sleep.

I remember a man on the streets of Prague who would make money from tourists by betting them that he could tell them their area code with only the name of their hometown. What I didn’t realize then was that anyone is capable of such feats of memorization, with practice. Mnemonists can memorize the sequence of a deck of shuffled playing cards in under 25 seconds, or the names of 1,500 conference attendees after hearing them once. Humans can do this by the use of mnemonic devices: acronyms, memory journeys, and storytelling. Our species is lousy at remembering abstractions — the opposite of memory, you’ll recall — but pretty good at remembering images and places. So a mnemonist will associate numbers (which are abstract concepts) with pictures and turn the first 100,000 decimal places of pi into a kind of mental comic book. Or they will take every line from The Iliad, turn each line into an image, and store each image somewhere in a “memory palace” (the remembrance of a well-known building, like one’s home) where the images can be “collected” in sequence. The spatial memory that helps you navigate your world is actually pretty keen; we lab rats have figured out the maze of our own construction quite nicely. But when it comes to spatial memory, there’s at least one animal who makes humans look like babes in the woods.

You look a little lost, dear.

Crane Style

It’s Kung Fu Week on The Quantum Biologist! Chinese martial arts have been imitating the hunting and defense styles of animals for thousands of years. What can we learn about the animals from the fighting styles? Shaolin Kung Fu has five major animal styles: Tiger, Panther, Crane, Snake, and Dragon. But there are many subcategories from other regions, including Horse, Mantis, Monkey, Frog, and even Duck. We’ll examine three this week.

Winter in New Mexico is a time for cranes. Sandhill cranes from Canada and Idaho fly south to the shores of the Rio Grande in Albuquerque and the Bosque del Apache refuge. I’ve been watching these elegant birds lately at the local wildlife preserve, strolling the mown meadows hunting for frogs, mice, snails and insects, purring their Spanish “rr”s with a sing-song trill. Occasionally, they leap above the tall grass. Occasionally, they fight. And when they fight, I cannot help but think of kung fu.

Shaolin White Crane Boxing is one of the few martial arts credited to a woman, a farmer named Fang Quiniang living in the Fujian province in the mid-1800s. Legend has it that Quiniang was tending her family’s rice field when a crane landed next to her. She tried hitting it with a stick, but with each thrust, the crane would jump and parry, blocking the stick with its feet and jabbing it with its beak. She studied the crane’s natural technique, imitating the movements of the wings and neck with her arms, and eventually founded one of the most graceful forms of Shaolin Kung Fu, a path which emphasizes physical balance, evasion over attack, and only the most efficient violence. But is Crane Style really much like the cranes’ style?

Song of Songs

If you’ve got it, flaunt it. The bowerbird shows off what riches live in his environment by artfully arranging flowers, beetle shells, and berries in his homemade museum. Magpies weave shiny objects into their nests to make them — and by proxy, themselves — more attractive. The artists of the bird world love to sample from their environment, creating mosaics and collages from the material available to them, appreciating the aesthetic value of a twig or a cat-tail. And where ever you find artists, you find plagiarists. Or, as they’re known today, deejays.

This clip from the BBC’s Life of Birds series went viral some years ago, but even if you haven’t seen it in a while, you should watch it again. The Superb Lyrebird, a pheasant-sized songbird from the forests of Southern Australia, is one of the greatest vocal mimics in the world. In the clip, you hear it mimic not only the other birds in its territory, but a car alarm from the parking lot encroaching its territory, the whine of a chainsaw destroying its forest, and the shutter of the camera from a photographer who’s come to film it before it has disappeared. Like a gangster’s parrot, you can tell a whole, poignant story just from the sounds the bird repeats.

Have you ever wondered why vocal mimics such as mynahs, parrots, and corvids learn to echo their surroundings? In the case of parrots, their ability to mimic the words of others is part of learning their language, the same as with humans. With mynahs and lyrebirds, the mimicry takes on an artistic touch. To further explore the phenomenon of audial mimicry, let’s turn to a humble species far more familiar to most of us than the lyrebird: the Northern Mockingbird.

Fjord!

Fans of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy will remember Slartibartfast, the planet architect who was very proud of his award-winning design for Norway. The fjords, he explained, were designed to give the continent a “baroque” feel. And a fjord is indeed a very splendid thing. A fjord, by definition, is a long and narrow inlet to the sea, flanked by very steep cliffs, and carved by glacial activity. (Or Slartibartfast.) While Norway coined the name “fjord,” they have no trademark on the geological flourish. You will find fjords anywhere there are mountains that meet the sea, and freezing temperatures to support glaciers, including the coast of Chile, New Zealand, and the Northwest coast of North America.

First Prize!

From time to time I like to take electronic expeditions to rare places on Earth, to see what I can find. Readers know I have a passion for fractals, and subscribe to something I call Fractal Earth Theory; the theory that the patterns of the planet are self-repeating ad infinitum. It was thinking about the true lengths of coastlines that led Mandelbrot to discover fractals in the first place; fjords make for rough edges in the world, wrinkling the land into a series of nooks and hidey-holes in which any manner of animal might live.

Today, we look for the unique wildlife of the fjords. I use a basic set of hypotheses as a compass:

1. Wherever life can exist, life will exist.
2. Where ever a habitat is geographically separated in any physical way, unique life will exist.
3. The more severely isolated a habitat is, the greater the number of unique species.

Fjords, however unique as geologic structures, are not very isolated: their cliffs connect with the mainland, and their inlets connect with the ocean. Their main aspects of geographic distinguishment are the steep angles of their cliffs, on which only certain wildflowers can grow, and the murky, silty, brackish water below. Fjords are often estuarine, with freshwater running as a river into their channels, which will certainly exclude many sensitive saltwater animals. The turbid, murky water is caused by violent tidal action, which in turn is caused by the water rushing over the lip of the terminal moraine left by the glacier at the fjord’s edge; this turbulence may also make the habitat even more exclusive, and more unique. But all in all, a fjord is not as isolated as a lake or an island, and we can’t expect a great number of unique species. But a few, sure. Some modifiers to the original compass:

4. The cold temperatures and low salinity will lead to a lower general biodiversity for animals, compared to a tropical habitat.
5. The cold water, with its high level of dissolved oxygen, will nonetheless support a high overall biomass.
6. The prediction of high aquatic biomass makes it more likely that any unique species are aquatic.

With these in mind, we set out to explore the nooks of the fjords, seeking life found nowhere else on Earth. And what we’ll find is a series of ecosystems among the most mysterious and little-known in science.

Altitude & Apotheosis

At a cruising altitude of 30,000 feet, an airplane pilot doesn’t expect to hit roadkill. After all, Mount Everest, the world’s tallest mountain, is 29,029 feet above sea level, and the paper-thin air at its peak is hardly substantial enough for any animal to breathe for long. If you’ve ever been on a plane, you know what 30,000 feet looks like: far above the clouds, you can’t see cars on the road, but you can see the ends of the Earth. Imagine, then, the surprise of that pilot flying over Côte d’Ivoire in 1973 on a transcontinental trip, breathlessly calling in to air traffic control, Abidjan, this is TWA Flight 498 at a cruising altitude of 11,000 meters. And I think… I think we just hit a bird.

Rüppell’s Griffon Vulture is the highest-flying bird in the world, reaching a world-record 36,100 feet above sea level — 14 miles high. (The first-place reward for that particular vulture was to be sucked into a jet’s turbines. No capes!) It can achieve this dizzying height because of its unique blood, which contains a special hemoglobin agent called alpha-D which bonds with oxygen extremely efficiently. But it’s one thing to know how it survives in the upper troposphere, and another to know why any animal would remove itself so far from the Earth.

The vulture was named for Eduard Rüppell, a German naturalist on tour in Northern Africa in the 1820’s and 30’s. Rüppell, being from a wealthy and educated family, was supremely comfortable back at home, yet chose one of the most uncomfortable places for a Northern European to explore: the Sahara and the deserts of Saudi Arabia, Israel, Ethiopia, Sudan, and Egypt. Essentially, he was sauerkraut on toast. But his contributions to zoology opened up the study of a region heretofore unknown to Western science: the desert ecosytem. Rüppell was the first biologst to speculate on why the desert fox has enormous ears (in, of course, a pre-Darwinian way) and observe the scimitar oryx in situ. And watching those minute specks wheeling above him in a blindingly blue sky until they disappeared from sight, he considered the vulture.

Silent Island

When writing about the Lesser Short-Tailed Bat colonizing New Zealand 30 million years ago, I wrote it from the perspective of the bat. But no species can colonize an inhabited island peacefully. The bat might think of itself as a pilgrim, while the native birds consider it an invader. And as humans invade and colonize each other’s lands by caravan, ship, and airplane, a form of animal imperialism has followed us.

Guam is a South Pacific island that was, at one point, idyllic. We cannot know what the ecosystem of Guam looked like 4,000 years ago when it was first colonized by humans, but when the dust and blood settled over the millenia, those early pioneers forged a sort of peace accord with the island, and the ecosystem re-calibrated itself to accommodate them. These people became the Chamorro, a culture based on the principles of respect and reciprocity. They had a mythology, but no religion; ancestor veneration took the place of deity worship. (Although there is one 17th century account of human sacrifice.)

Then, in the 15th century, the Spanish invaded. To say nothing of the misery visited on the people, the island was invaded by the rats, pigs, dogs, chickens, deer, and water buffalo the Spaniards brought with them; an ecological blitzkrieg. When control of Guam was passed to the U.S. after the Spanish-American War of 1898, we established a major naval base there (and introduced the poisonous and insatiable cane toad), which in turn was captured by the Japanese after Pearl Harbor. The Chamorro suffered torture, beheadings, and rape under Japanese occupation, and the island suffered the Giant African Snail which devastated the island’s crops. This is not to mention all of the invasive plants and pathogens introduced, which starved the local wildlife and pushed out the native vegetation. Then, in the 1950’s, when the island was again under the stars & stripes, we struck what could be the finishing blow.

This is the Guam Micronesian Kingfisher. No picture I could find could do justice to the magnificent plumage of this bird, which I have seen at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. It behaves very much like North America’s belted kingfisher: furtive, with a raspy, laughing call, and specialized for diving into the water to catch small fish. It was once found all over the island. Now the kingfisher, like most of the birds on Guam, is extinct in the wild, the victim of American imperialism and a little brown snake.