Science Friday - Book Club Birds, Amazon Burning. August 23, 2019, Part 1

Episode Date: August 23, 2019

“Bird-brain” has long been an insult meant to imply slow-wittedness or stupidity. But in reading Jennifer Ackerman’s The Genius of Birds, SciFri Book Club readers have been learning that birds often have wits well beyond ours—take the mockingbird’s capacity to memorize the songs of other birds, or the precise annual migrations of hummingbirds and Arctic terns. Or the New Caledonian crow, which make tools and solve puzzles that might mystify human children. UCLA pigeon researcher Aaron Blaisdell and University of Wisconsin neuroscientist Lauren Riters join Ira and producer Christie Taylor to talk about the brightest minds of the bird world, and the burning questions remaining about avian brains. The Brazilian rainforest is experiencing a record number of fires this year—an 83% increase over 2018. Since last week, smoke from an estimated 9,500 fires has blocked out the sun for thousands of miles, covering cities like São Paulo in a dark cloud. Environmental agencies and researchers suspect the fires are human caused, cattle ranchers and loggers who are looking to clear the land for their own use. Ryan Mandelbaum, science writer for Gizmodo, gives us a rundown of the unprecedented destruction currently underway, and other science headlines, in this week's News Roundup. Plus: In North Carolina, electric vehicle charging stations will start operating more like gas pumps. David Boraks, from WFAE 90.7 in Charlotte, tells Ira more in "The State Of Science." Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Irafledo. Ladies and gentlemen, the Amazon is burning. The Brazilian rainforest is experiencing a record number of fires this year, an 83% increase over 2018. 70,000 fires. How do you set them that fast? 70,000 have blocked out the sun for thousands of miles, covering cities like Sao Paulo in a dark cloud.

Environmental agencies and researchers suspect the fires have been seen, set by people, cattle ranchers and lagers perhaps who are looking to clear the land to grow cash crops. And they've been encouraged to do so by Brazilian President Bolsonaro, who campaigned on a promise to help Brazil's economy by exploring the Amazon's economic potential. Joining us to tell us about this unprecedented burning of the Amazon rainforest, as well as other short subjects in science, is Ryan Mandelbaum, science writer for Gizmodo. Welcome back, Ryan. It's good to be back, Ira. Let's talk about the Amazon. What's happening there right now?

So the Amazon is burning at an alarming rate. We're talking maybe a soccer pitch-sized area every few minutes. 82% more fires than last year. You know, this is more extreme than sort of 2016, which is an extreme case. And as far as we know, it is due to sort of the business because of clearing of the land. and in, you know, Bolsonaro's government, you know, Brazil's new president, Bolsonaro is sort of scaling back the enforcement of the illegal burning of the forest, and it is encouraging businesses to then go in and then start clearing what is essentially the lungs of the planet.

I just, it's amazing. It's scary, isn't it? I mean, I lose sleep over it. It's, this is as bad as it gets. You know, and of course, this has everything to do with climate change, too, doesn't it? That's right. I mean, this is. is, you know, the Amazon is responsible for taking carbon out of the atmosphere. It's responsible for putting oxygen back into the atmosphere. And this is the kind of thing that, you know, if we lose the Amazon, we're losing a vital piece of the fight against climate change. I know you love to talk about astrophysics.

I know you feel like I do that. You got to talk about the Amazon because it is life on Earth. But let's talk about physics for a little bit. Let's talk about LIGO scientists or we're reporting that they have detected what they think. thing is a black hole colliding with a neutron star? Why is that a big deal? Well, so LIGO has already detected the evidence of two black holes colliding, and that was a huge deal because of the gravitational waves that we found here on Earth. And then shortly after, they discovered two neutron stars colliding, where a neutron star is a dead star about the diameter

of a city that's even heavier than the sun. And so this is the completing that trifecta. So we've got two black holes, two neutron stars, and now a black hole and a neutron star. And, And I mean, it's exciting to see new things. And, you know, this, again, the detection is based on the gravitational waves, and it's more stuff coming from LIGO. Isn't that fun? Yeah, it's great. I mean, I like this. Yeah, it's a fun thing to think about it.

What, what, for people who don't remember what a neutron star is, what is a neutron star? Right. So it's a super dense object. It's about, you know, let's say the same size is like Brooklyn across, but then it's as massive as a sun. So it's just mind-boggling to think about these things existing, but, you know, it's the corpse of a star that's. that's died. That's a good way to put it. And there must be many of these going on.

This might be just the first one. Yeah. So there actually has already been a couple of potential detections of this kind of event. And this seems to be one of the strongest ones. But LIGO is now running full steam heads. So the hope is that we continue to detect these weird kind of events. And then hopefully one day actually see if there's a electromagnetic, you know, a light component to this with our telescopes. Let's continue on our weird, okay?

Because let's go talk about chemists. actually creating a different kind of carbon. Ira, you like graphene, right? I love it. You love graphing. I use it every day. Every day, right. So graphene is a two-dimensional allotrop of carbon, which is, you know, it's just carbon.

And diamond is a three-dimensional network of carbon. So now scientists have created and looked up close at a single-dimensional ring of carbon. So it's just carbon, carbon in a ring, 18 carbon atoms. And they're using atomic forks microscopy, so they use this microscope with an atomic-sized tip, and they make a precursor molecule, and they knock off the scaffolding, and then they have this crazy single-dimensional carbon ring. You know, people don't realize they can make their own graphene with some scotch tape. Right, and a pencil.

Yeah. This is just, you know, another, this carbon ring is like another cool kind of carbon, and it's showing all the weird ways that we could make carbon into these different forms. And then, you know, they have these interesting electronic properties. So the hope is maybe these carbon rings will be useful for like a low-interested. energy computing. All right. Let's move on to some more,

a lot of exciting stuff today. The NASA's Europa Clipper mission is moving into the final phase. Remind us about what that mission is about. That's exciting also. Yeah, so Jupiter's Moon Europa has, has potentially a liquid water ocean underneath, and we know, thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope, that it actually has these plumes of water that it spews into the air over Europe.

Now, the hope is that if it has a water ocean, well, then maybe there is some sort of biological, stuff going on. Maybe there's life down there. And if we had a clipper, we could fly by Europa and maybe either sample the plumes, look at this moon up close, and look if there's any sign of something interesting going on down there.

It seems like the search for life is big out there in a solar system these days. Yeah, I mean, there's the earth is only one way we know that life could be formed. Maybe there's other, I mean, in the bottom of our own ocean, we have such interesting life forms that rely on the

sort of chemistry, the chemical potential in order to live. And maybe that's happening deep in Europa. Who knows? Because we know there are some really hardy organisms living right here in Earth. They're impervious to all kinds of insults. Maybe they could be out there also, right? Extremophiles, they call them, right? So they live in the salt. They live in the heat. It's awesome. Great. Thank you. Ryan Mandelbaum, Science Rider-Vigizmoto. Thanks, I are always good to be here. Good to have you back. And now we're going to move on to check in on the state of science. This is KERA. For W. W.S. Louis Public Radio News. Iowa Public Radio News. Local science stories of national significance.

Many states are trying to get more drivers to use electric cars, but here's something we haven't quite figured out yet. How should drivers be charged for a charge? A new law in North Carolina will change how electric charging stations in the state operate to make them more like gas pumps. David Borax is an environment and energy reporter at WFAE in Charlotte, North Carolina. He's here to fill us in. Welcome to Science Friday.

Hello, Ira, how are you? Fine. Let's talk about this. Before the law, how did price of electric charging stations work now in North Carolina? Well, the way it works right now is that owners of electric vehicle charging stations, if they want to get paid for this, they have to charge users by the amount of time it takes to fill up your battery with electricity. And that's a little bit of a problem because not all cars charge at the same speed, and there are lots of variables there.

So if I have a fast-speeching car, I'll get more electricity in the same time, and that's not equitable, basically. That's right. And folks who run these charging stations in the industry say it's not fair to charge that way. And that includes Tesla, which is kind of the big guy in the field right now. All right. So how's charging going to work from now on? Well, the law has in North Carolina and many other states now is changing to allow them to charge by the kilowatt hour. And you could think of that as much the same as charging per gallon of gas, the way that's the way.

it comes out of the pump for your gas guzzler right now. So that should change the picture entirely, and that will be much more lined up with the amount of energy that you use to charge. So are there any concerns about how well this will work, whether it's going to be rolling out smoothly or not? Well, there's a lot to be done before we get here in North Carolina. There are a few places around the country that already have charging stations that are metered by the kilowatt hour.

But in North Carolina, all the stations up until now have had to operate according to time, And so the owners of these stations now, their next task will be to update their equipment or get new equipment to do this. And then there's the whole question of how much we'll pay for this. So this actually could work for gas stations, let's say, who want to put a charging station in there because they know that there are more Teslas and other cars on the road. I mean, I have one. I'm sure a lot of people buying them. But they could start to make money from the charging, right?

They could. And actually, it's a great question. Why haven't we seen this yet? Why haven't some of the big gasoline chains put in at least one charging station there? Yeah, but now if you give them an incentive that they can make some money, right? And they can charge by the gallon, so to speak, or the kilowatt hour. This is a way for them to make some dough also. And that's really why North Carolina legislators decided to change the law

and why the governor signed the bill. There are a lot of companies lined up to compete in this area. So we're going to see a lot of evolution in the next few years. But we could see separate stations. We could see existing gas stations doing this. And, of course, there's all the places where you find a charger right now, which are everywhere from your grocery store, parking lot, to your company office garage.

I know I stayed at a hotel recently because I had to travel 200 miles to get there, and I picked that little hotel because they had a charging station, right, as a part of the hotel. I guess that could be more of a trend here because you can not only have gas stations, but you could have hotels that could charge for it. And some of the companies that are active in the, charger space, they're actually selling chargers to anybody who wants to install them. And so it has become popular for some businesses to offer this as an add-on. And oftentimes at these places, it's free.

I don't know what you paid at your hotel there, but oftentimes they do that as an extra service, as an add-on. I think we'll more and more begin to see this as a money-making opportunity for people who operate chargers. Yeah, mine was free. I mean, they actually put their own real Tesla charger in there, a couple of them. And I mean, that's the way they got people in there. Let's move on to another aspect of this because you've reported and how there's such a demand for electric cars that North Carolina is reopening its lithium mines. Yeah, that's right. There's a company that has been looking in western North Carolina at a site that used to be a lithium mine. Back from the 1940s up to the 1980s, there were lithium mines about 30 miles west of Charlotte. And that was at a time when the

main uses for lithium were as like an industrial grease, as an additive to ceramics to make them stronger and everybody's familiar with lithium as an antidepressant drug. But that industry looked elsewhere to South America and Australia for lithium until we got to this point now where everybody has a lithium battery in all their devices and their automobiles. And so that's caused some investors to take a look at these old mines and this area west of Charlotte and begin testing. And there's a company called Piedmont Lithium that I have written about, which is looking at an area that stretches from the tip of one county all the way to the South Carolina border, and they have acquired about 2,200 acres of land or contracts on land,

and they foresee about a 25-year supply of lithium here, and they're talking it up as the biggest supply in North America right now of traditional lithium deposits. Wow, because it is very rare, David. Thank you very much. This is interesting stuff. We'll have to have you back soon. Thanks for taking time.

You're welcome. David Borak's Environment and Energy Reporter at WFAE in Charlotte, North Carolina. We're going to take a break, and after we come back, we're going to talk about birds. You want to talk about birds? Yeah, please, give us a call. Our number 844-724-8255. 844-724-8255. You can also tweet us at SciFri.

It's the last chapter of our summer book club. We've been reading the book, The Genius of Birds. And we're going to talk about the Genius of Birds with Jennifer Ackerman, Ryan Mandelbaum would love to be in on this conversation. We'll be right back after this break. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato.

Is bird brain a compliment? No, right? I mean, you've got to say no because we've long associated that phrase with someone who's not that smart, which makes sense if you go by that old assumption about birds themselves. Small heads, lightweight bodies can't have much room for weighty thoughts, right, if you also want to fly. But if you've been reading our summer book club pick Jennifer Ackerman's The Genius of Birds, you know there's a lot more going on in the mind of a bird than we used to give them credit for. The famous tool-using crows of New Caledonia, brightly decorated nests of Bowerbirds,

mocking birds, amazing memorization and mimicry, and of course the annual migration over thousands of miles by so many species. Our listeners have been reading the book all summer and send some observations of smart behaviors. behavior through our Science Friday Vox Pop app. Here in New Zealand, we had two little blue penguins trying to make a nest under a sushi shop in Wellington City and then Waddle in the shop looking for food. I think a smart animal is an animal who can reach its objective, either through communicating with other animals or figuring out a way to communicate with humans or being resourceful in their ideas and figuring out how to problem solve. I think every kind of animal knows how to do what it

needs to do. So I think that defining smart is in a way trying to compare apples to oranges. Once when I was fishing, I was repeatedly whistling the theme song to the Rifleman television show. After doing it many times, I went silent. Not soon after I heard a mockingbird. repeating back the first few notes repeatedly. Thank you to Michelle from New Zealand, Moralia from Oregon, Ronnie from Pennsylvania, and Greg from Kentucky for those comments. We're going to spend the rest of the hour celebrating these brilliant birds and here to help. We've got sci-fri producer and bird book nerd Christy Taylor. Welcome back, Christy.

Hey, Ira. Nice to have you back. Yeah, me too. You know I'm a bit sad to be done talking about birds for this year. I am too. And, you know, as someone who really loves birds, but I actually don't know much about them individually. I've really loved having an excuse to dig down deep into some of the topics about their brains. We've learned that birds can see in the ultraviolet this last summer and that the birds that the birds that we see, for example. The way songbirds learn to sing has a lot to do with how we learn to talk, all kinds of things like that. And we sent our listeners out looking for birds. I know I was paying closer attention to my backyard feeder this summer. And even though this is the last week for the book club, I feel like my appreciation of birds isn't over. I'm very happy to keep looking for those birds.

Yeah, me too. And thanks to everyone who joined us on the I Naturalist app to share some of their cool bird findings. There were people who went out looking and they found some really neat species. Kiyas, gross beaks. Meanwhile, all I found were pigeons. But as we'll hear soon, pigeons are really, really smart. That's true. Let me bring in the rest of our bird nerds to talk.

talk about that. Let's bring them in right now. Aaron Blaisdale, Professor of Psychology at UCLA. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, Ira. Thank you for having me here. And hi, Christy. And Dr. Lauren Readers is a professor of animal behavior and neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. So, Aaron, I'm going to start with you because we just mentioned pigeons, and you're studying those in particular. How smart is a pigeon? Well, as the common, commentators were already savvy and suggesting it's really tricky to define smart. It's kind of a general purpose word. But if we think of it within psychology as how kind of intelligent are you in a way that we think that humans differ in intelligence between each other, then you can start looking at some basic aspects of smartness like what is their cognition like? What kind of memory do they have? How much can they learn and what kind of learning? And can they even do abstract reasoning? And on all of those kinds of dimensions of cognitive processes, we see that pigeons, when they've been studied on these, show strong abilities across the board. Lauren, when we're marveling at specific tasks, a bird is good at, like singing, navigation, or problem solving.

Do all of these map back to specific parts of the brain being better developed, like the hippocampus and navigational skill? Yeah, that's a good question. And it's very, yeah, people are interested in looking at that. So, for example, the hippocampus is the best-studied brain area for its role in spatial cognition in birds. So it's larger in homing pigeons, which, you know, they develop these amazing navigational maps that they use to find their way home from locations they'd never been before. And chickadees and scrub jays, they cash seeds and their hippocampus is larger. And even female cowbirds, that they don't put eggs in their own nest. They have to put them in other bird's nest.

So they have to keep track of all these spatial locations of nests. Even they have larger hippocampi with more neurons. So yeah, definitely, you know, people are really interested in what brain areas regulate these different amazing abilities. So where did that bird brain stereotype come from in the first place, Lauren or Aaron? Okay, I'm happy to start that a little bit. Sure. So it was known that, I mean, if you look at a bird brain, first of all, it is smooth. It's not wrinkled like a mammalian brain.

If you look at the layers of the bird brain, you don't see distinct layers, actually. It's just not organized the same way as a mammal brain. So it was thought that, you know, by flying, birds gave up. You know, flying, you need to be light, and they thought this means that your brain has to be smaller. And then when people named brain structure in the brain, they'd call them things like paleo, as if they were old. And when they named structures in the mammal brain, they'd call them neo, as if they were new. And so it wasn't until we started looking more closely at neurochemicals, the way the brain's organized. and counting neurons that we realize the bird brain is much more complicated than we first thought.

I was really struck by the New Caledonia crows about how smart they are at making tools. Explain to our listeners just how smart they are. Well, I've kind of read a lot of the literature and following that for many years about the New Caledonian crows. And crows are a member of the Corvid family, and Corvids in general, Corvids includes other kind of crows, rooks, and jays. They tend to be really smart. We've recognized for a long time that they seem to be able to solve problems better than other birds. But the New Caledonian crows are just even an order of magnitude smarter, seemingly.

They can make their own tools. So there's a small island New Caledonia in the South Pacific, and they've been shown to either take twigs. and bend them into hook shapes or to cut the pandanus leaves, which big broad leaves, into stepped tools like a saw. And then they use these tools to reach the crevices that their bills cannot reach all the way into, and they pull out grubs and other kind of critters to eat.

And the other thing about that is once birds learn a new tool, they can teach other birds? That's amazing. Yeah, I wasn't so sure about the teaching part, because teaching specifically has, by definition, involves the teacher intentionally trying to shape the behavior of the pupil. And my understanding from what I read is that in animals, this is almost non-existent, pretty rare. But what I think the New Caledonian Crows do is offer the young, the opportunity to observe the adults using the children. tools and they can learn through that observation. So Lauren, your work got a mention in the book.

And one of the things that we're asking in the course of looking at your research, for example, is are birds enjoying what they're doing? Or why are they singing? How does one interrogate that question in the first place? Right. So I think that's a really interesting question. And it is clear why birds are singing in some context and what reinforces it. So it's clear that males are going to sing courtship song to attract mates,

and if they attract a mate, that's reinforcing. But they also sing in other contexts that aren't as well studied. So right now you're going to start seeing birds like starlings, forming large flocks. And we know that they sing a lot in these flocks and that it is actually really important for them to practice their songs. Starlings learn songs throughout their lives. But it's not clear why in an immediate sense that they're singing. And I look through some of the literature, and I was surprised to see that Darwin actually proposed that maybe in these context, birds are singing because it feels good.

He says that they're singing for their own amusement. And there is evidence for that. So, for example, in Starlings, we found that if birds are singing in these flocks, they develop a preference for where they were singing in those flocks, just like you might develop a preference for a place where you had a positive experience, like a good meal in a restaurant, for example. Well, let's go to the phones because there's so many people who want to talk about this. So let's go to Kathy in Indiana.

Hi, Kathy. Hi. Hi. Go ahead. So my question is, I live in Northern Indiana, and last summer, we heard a bird that sounded like a blaster, like a science fiction blaster being charged and then fired. And it sounded like this. And no one can tell me what it is. You want to do that again? Yeah, it sounds like that. Okay, maybe we can get it identified.

Aaron, Lauren, have any idea? I'm not very good with bird calls. Lauren, do you have any experience with that? Yeah, I am not sure I'm quite getting that. It's not unfamiliar, but yeah, I too. I'm not an ornithologist, although I do know more about birds than other people. So the pew, pew, pew, pew, I'm not sure what you're. listening to. Yeah, it was very strange, and several of us heard it. I didn't know, is there a way

to get online? Is there any kind of website that would do sound recognition that we could look it up? That's a good question. I know there are apps now that have been made available for music or even for speech that do that, but I've never thought to look in the space for bird call recognition song, but that would be a great tool. I don't know of any. Yeah, I think people are working on bird song apps that can do that. And you can definitely go on websites like the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and play back the songs of birds that are living in your area, and you could probably identify that bird. I have a question for everyone, actually, before we go back into research questions, since this is a book that gave us a really wonderful broad

survey of all kinds of ways in which birds are smart and all the cool things they do, I did want to see if anyone has a new favorite bird after reading this book, or even just a new appreciation for a bird that they didn't appreciate before. Ira, I'm going to let you go first. Well, you know, I started watching. The interesting thing, after reading the book, I started watching for smart birds or smart actions of birds,

and I saw some social actions of birds that were described in the book about how they deal with each other. But still my favorite bird, maybe it's because it's taking me so long to get it into my feeder. It was still my hummingbirds. And what was surprising about the hummingbirds,

which were, you know, talked about in the book, is that they come back. They come back every year to the feeder, right? I mean, they know where it is and they come for the food. Is that right, Lauren? That is right. Aaron, did you get a new favorite or are you still stuck on pigeons? Well, pigeons, actually, even though I study pigeons,

they've not always been my favorite bird, although since studying them, they've become one of my favorites. Hummingbirds are actually still one of my favorites. But I think reading the book, what I found, new appreciation for two, one that has been a long-term favorite, but even more respect for now, and that's the mockingbird. Incredible diversity within an individual of how plastic the song is, that is how much it can change and adopt the sounds that it hears and really mimic them to such a great extent.

And the other was the Bowerbird. Oh, my God. I knew about Bowerbirds, but by reading the book, I didn't realize quite how, one, how intense the competition was between males. for attracting a female as a mate. And two, just the sheer complexity of some of these bowers. I'm Ira Flato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Lauren, your favorite bird?

All right. I think that's an impossible question. I do study starlings, and I know that ornithologists would be screaming because they're invasive and they're kicking out native bird populations, their agricultural pests. But I do have a strong appreciation for them. However, if I had to think of my favorite bird, I actually came up with a backyard bird. which is the cardinal. So I think they're beautiful. I love the males red plumage.

I love the females, kind of her tan and gray plumage. They both sing, females sing on the nest. Males are feeding the females while they're sitting on the nest. I think they're gorgeous in summer. And then in snow, which I'm in Wisconsin, right? We have really rough winters. Those gorgeous cardinals, I think, are a really nice bright spot for me. Yeah, I've got them in my backyard, too.

And, you know, it seems like they run in families. Am I right about that? There seems to be six or eight at one time. I think it depends what time of year because they definitely don't tolerate other birds very well, but they will, you know, you'll have a male-female pair in your backyard and then you might be observing their offspring. And then in fall, they become a little more socially tolerant when they're not defending breeding territories. So they're at your feeder. You may observe, you know, a small flock of cardinals. Does social behavior make a bird smart?

I mean, this is one thing that Ackerman talks about in her explorations, but is there an intelligence to hanging out with other birds? Well, I think that there can be, this is the social intelligence hypothesis, which has also been used to understand human intelligence. There is some support for it, and then there's some support that it's more of a technical intelligence, and both of those kinds of approaches have been covered in the book. And I think you can look at examples, and coming back to the Bowerbird, actually, that's one example where intelligence seems to have been shaped by sexual selection, that is, by females, choosing the males that could produce the best bowers, the most symmetrical, that have the best songs and dances to accompany them. And they also tend to scale with brain size, which is kind of a proxy for intelligence. So the bowerbirds that build the most elaborate nests that have the most elaborate displays tend to have the relatively larger brains within that group of birds than a smaller one. Let me see if I can get a quick phone call in from Oregon.

Hi, welcome to Science Friday. Hi there. Go ahead. Hi, quickly, please. So this morning when I got home, my yard was full of birds' sounds, and then I noticed there was a little bird stuck in my woodshed window. And I went and I grabbed it and got it outside.

And then like all the rest of the birds, the crows, the hummingbirds, the crows, everybody calmed down. So they were all watching as if. they knew it was rescued? Yeah. Wow. Is that true? Lauren?

Well, that is interesting. I mean, I've definitely read studies where if a bird is in distress and they have heart rate monitors on other birds nearby, that their heart rate goes up even higher than it would in response to thunder. So birds will definitely respond to the distress of another individual. We're going to come back and talk lots more with Christy Taylor, Aaron Blaisdale and Lauren Readers. Our number 844724-825. five, call us about your bird experiences. Also you can tweet us at SciFry. We'll be right back more on the brilliance of birds after this break.

You're listening to Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. We're finishing up our summer book club pick. Jennifer Ackerman's The Genius of Birds. And I know if you've been listening, how smart and talented they really are. I mean, you'll learn a lot from this book. With my guest, Dr. Aaron Blaisdell and Dr. Lauren Readers. and here to take us along the way is Christy Taylor.

Book nerd on this one. Book bird nerd. Yeah, so Lauren, one of the things that this book talks about too is, you know, you're interrogating bird enjoyment of things, and one of the things we talk about is bird play. So, you know, there are these famous crow videos of crows like sliding down and sledding on things, on roofs, for example, and parrot owners. They know they need a lot of toys to stay happy. but why is play so important?

And how do we even know if this is like about enjoyment or just a random behavior trait? Right. So I was definitely interested in the play part. Do birds do things just for fun? And you know, you think of play. You know, it's synonymous with fun, which makes it seem not very serious. But I think that this is, you know, an important topic. So play develops physical skills, cognition, social skills.

And these are skills that birds need to use later. in more serious situations. And so the book includes some famous examples that you've mentioned playing parrots, and Kiyas are basically destroying towns in New Zealand because they play so hard. You've got ravens playing catch, crows sledding. But given the impressive cognitive skills

we see in birds, I was surprised to see that it's often said that about 1% of the 10,000 bird species play. But I actually think, based on some of my research, does it feel good to sing, I think that we could add 4,000 songbirds to that list. because when they are learning or practicing song, I propose they're playing because they're trying out different songs, they're sequencing and reseeking elements,

sequencing elements. They're basically riffing. And so there is evidence that this type of singing is pleasurable. And so I think that, you know, we can say those birds are playing as well, and we even have some evidence that it could be rewarded by endogenous opioids, which is something that you also see for play. Let's go to the phones to California. Linda, hi, welcome to Science Friday.

Oh, great. It just came back in. It was cutting out for a while. Hi. Hi, go ahead. Linda, go ahead. We have Jay in our backyard, and one of them in particular has come back several years in a row. We have a big bird feeder, and he will land on it and shake it, shake it, and then he'll fly up on the fence and let the starlings and the finches and things come and eat the grain on the ground.

and he never eats it. And I thought, is he doing this out of the goodness of his heart? Or I don't know. I kind of feel that he does that because of that. Yeah, it's male because it's blue. We have a creek behind us, and there's plenty of food over there. So is this a behavior that birds are known for? Erin, is this an altruistic bird?

Good question. These anecdotes are very tricky to, to interpret because you don't know what the reason is that the bird started doing this behavior. But there's some evidence for altruism in the sense, among birds as well as mammals. But in the sense that it tends to be something that's reinforced to some degree. So there's often maybe when the bird had started, this Jay had started doing this and it brought other birds. Maybe there was something that happened at that first few times that reinforced this Jay's behavior. and now it's kind of learned to do this.

Yeah, it's very tricky, but definitely there are a lot of interspecies interactions of both communication and non-communative interactions in birds. Let me give you my $64 question I ask all the time. If you were to study birds, and what don't you know that you would most like to know and what kind of equipment would you need on my blank check, which I don't have for you? 64 whole dollars.

Shucks. Lauren, do you want to answer that first? Oh, that is an impossible question. There's so many interesting questions. So I think one thing is just it's really hard to know what the birds are perceiving and what they're experiencing. So what would be the question that I would ask? Yeah. Aaron, if you have something while I'm thinking about this, please jump in.

I didn't mean to put you on the spot on that. I just thought they were both on the spot. But I could jump in. Well, is there something about imaging bird brains or learning about the structure of their brains or how they work or anything like that? I think how they work, like getting inside the mind of an animal. That's what I do for a living. And it is tough work because it's really you're deriving inferences from the behavior. And even imaging neural activity, the brain in action while a bird's doing something,

is still the behavior of populations of neurons. So it's giving you indirect evidence to what they're, experiencing from their own point of view. But nevertheless, those are the steps, the closest steps we can take, I think, if I had a nice big check, would be to add imaging, real detailed type of imaging of the brain while they're doing these complex interactions like the New Caledonian Crows and see what's going on there, that we can then compare to how human brains also work, and we can extrapolate from that. we're actually

this actually brings to mind a question that I have had Lauren and Aaron and we're having an event in New York City actually next week where our audience members get to test themselves against some of the same problems that we know birds are really good at like remembering where they hid lots and lots of food but is it really fair to compare birds and humans can we learn

is that fair can we learn anything or are they completely different kinds of intelligence I don't know Lauren you go first yeah well I was going to say So, you know, we have a hard time measuring animal minds because we can't perceive things that they perceive. We don't even have the sensory capacity, you know, in some cases. We can't hear song the way they do. We can't see feather color the way they do.

And so we want to interview a bird, but to do so, we need to ask the right questions, you know, that makes sense to birds, and you need to give the right species the right test. It's got to be tough, but not too tough. And often this means you have to make the test ecologically valid. So asking birds about what they do in their natural environment. And so then if a bird flunks the test, you have to consider the possibility. It's really your test field of bird because maybe you're human bias. I've got a lot of calls coming and let's see how many we can get in.

Let's go to Minneapolis and Jim. Hi, Jim. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, there. Hi, go ahead. Well, first of all, I have a wild guest that the person who called in earlier with a pew, pew, pew, pew bird call, that sounds a lot like a Blue J alarm call to me. So she might want to check some of those on that Cornell lab of Ornithology.

website. They have a set of sounds you can download. My question is about counting. Can you talk about birds counting skills and arithmetic skills, which birds are good at it, and why would they have evolved the ability to do counting and mathematics? Good question. That's an excellent question. There's a few, two species in particular in which this has been studied most extensively. One, of course, is the pigeon, which is very easy to study in the laboratory. using our typical behavioral techniques. And pigeons do show this ability to order items based on how many are in the set.

So they'll pick one and then two, and then three, and then four. And after they learn to pick an order of items, one, two, three, four, you can give them five versus seven. They've never seen either before, and they'll pick the correct ordering of those numbers. And parrots also can do these kinds of things, of course, even more extensively than pigeons. Wow.

Here's a tweet coming in from MSM on Twitter says, I live in South Florida through observation. I can recognize when there is a bird of prey in the area. All of the birds sound an alarm and a call that is very distinct. Different species will call out at the same time. Do they understand each other? That's great. Are there one species or one kind of bird signaling to everybody,

or how does that work? Well, birds definitely eavesdrop on other birds and take advantage of, you know, they'll hear another bird signal and they will definitely respond. And so some birds will call when they see a predator. Starlings, they go silent. So if we're observing birds and they go silent, we know a hawk has shown up. But other birds definitely tap into the information, social information provided by other birds. Hmm, we've got lots of calls.

Let's go to Marjorie in Socrates, New York. Hi, Marjorie. Marjorie, are you there? Yes. Go, go for it. Can you know? You must be on a cell phone or close. Oh, okay.

We've got to have to drop Margie. She had an interesting question about Ravens and how smart ravens were. So that's made abundantly clear in this book, Lauren, isn't it? Ravens are how smart they are. Oh, yeah. The Ravens are incredible. I mean, there's so many examples of the Ravens. They are, you know, just, well, the whole Corvett family, hiding food, making tools.

you know, deception, they're involved in deception, the way they open food, you know, dropping nuts onto streets so that cars can roll over them. I mean, it's amazing some of the things that they can do. I feel like I need to break in and speak for non-corvid birds for a second because they are very popular and we talk about them a lot on this show and they're definitely very smart. But we had Stephen in our Facebook group mentioned that he actually has a different nominee for smartest bird if we're going to rank them. He said the corporate. are hard to beat, yet the ability of many species to navigate very long distances is mind-blowing. We love to feed humming birds. Their antics can be very entertaining. And these tiny birds migrate such

long distances. Also, the ability of homing pigeons to return to a home roost is also legendary. And that reflects a tweet that David says, how do birds, or for that matter matter know how to find their way without a map and return to the exact same spot such as a migration? How do they know that? Well, there's a combination of many different kind of skills that they might use. And for example, the homing pigeon, they use, if they're far from home, they'll use kind of large global cues like where the sun is and where the stars might be if they're flying at night. Or even odor trails, odor gradients. So they can smell downwind or upwind kind of a more familiar location.

But then, and they'll use that to get their bearings and get their direction. as it get closer to where their home is, they'll start using things like visual cues, landmarks, that are familiar to them. And so what's amazing is some birds like the pigeon cues a wide variety of cues. Others like the indigo bunting that travels hundreds or thousands of kilometers use like the North Star.

Wow. Let's get an interesting sidebar question from Bill in Cleveland. Hi, Bill. Hello, how are you? Fine, go ahead. Okay, our first question is, can we actually traced bird lineages. I mean, birds are a dinosaur lineage. And I read too recently that the modern orders of birds actually came into existence before the KT boundary happened. Is there any genetic

experimentation or a reading done to find out where maybe the first original modern bird came from? Second, favorite bird boattail grackle. They're smart and they're generalists. Do we have any knowledge about the lineage of birds? When did the first bird start? Everybody know? When was a bird a bird? Yeah. It's thought that, you know, birds and mammals diverged from a common reptilian ancestor over 300 million years ago.

And they are doing a lot of genetic studies looking at the genomes of different birds, and they're kind of surprised they're smaller than most other animals, smaller than most mammals. And it's thought maybe that has to do with flight, like everything's smaller because of flight. And I thought it was really interesting to note, and this was also in the book, that turkeys are thought to be one of the most closely related to dinosaurs. And so that's easy.

You know, when I'm looking at them walking around my backyard, you can see sort of these reptilian, these actually, you know, dinosaur-like features as they go around. I'm Ira Flater. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Talking about birds with Aaron Blaisdale and Dr. Lauren Readers and Christy Taylor. Well, since we talked about the past of birds, let's talk about the future for a second. The last chapter of the book looks at what is maybe the best adapted bird for this human-dominated arrow, in, and maybe it is the house sparrow, which we see everywhere. They are apparently smarter than pigeons in some ways. They seem to have this novelty-seeking behavior that makes them

really well adapted to cities. Lauren, you found this actually kind of depressing in the long run, right? Well, I did. I thought this was an important chapter, the last chapter of the book, but it was kind of the buzzkill chapter because each chapter, you're introduced to one fascinating example of bird genius after another, you know, in all these species. And it's clear by the end of the book that birds are highly interconnected with the rhythms of the planet. So they time their breeding and migration to closely match seasonal changes in temperature, the photo period, the availability of insects and plants and flowing water. And there's an example of the red knot that they need to time migration perfectly to match horseshoe crab eggs. So the changes we're making to the planet

disrupt the synchrony. So the plants and insects may not be available and birds need them. And what that means is a lot of these cool species, they're at risk, except the most flexible, which would be the sparrows, crows, maybe starlings. Pigeons. And, you know, they're fascinating. But the book, really, I thought, created awareness about the interconnectedness of the birds and what we have to lose if we don't, you know, watch what we're doing and take care of our planet. Because, are you saying that climate change really is affecting the birds? Yeah, well, the climate change can throw out of sync the availability of the resources that the birds need to breed. You know, and you're changing temperature, so some species that are living on mountains are having to move further and further up the mountains, right,

so that they can exist at temperatures that work for them, and they're running out of space. So, yeah, climate change, I think, is a real problem for these birds. Aaron, are you optimistic about the future of birds? Well, I agree with Lauren and with the book that That is really a dire situation for the number of different species But if you take the longer range view, I like to balance it out a little bit of stoic in me The balance out the longer range view is that even after the catastrophic event of the dinosaur mass extinction It allowed such a radiation of mammals and birds

And whatever mass extinction we're going to cause I like to think that the life will recover, become variable and diverse again, as much as I'm weeping about the current loss of diversity. One last Twitter question is, what is the frequency range, what frequency are they bird sensitive to? What do they hear? I mean hearing? Yeah. Is it, you know, is it above the range? Like we always see dog whistles, they're above our hearing? Or are they?

That depends on the species. Lauren, you might know more about that. But I know some birds really can hear really high levels and some in the infrasound. Yeah. So a lot of the frequency range is similar to. hours, but some can hear out of the frequency range. And then they also are adjusting the frequency. So, you know, this is a thing we're talking about the climate and how, you know, there's noise disturbance. And so birds will adjust their vocalizations singing at different frequencies to try to avoid noise pollution that we've introduced. We've run out of time so much, so much this talk about so little time. As always,

Dr. Aaron Blaisdell, Professor of Psychology at UCLA, Dr. Lauren Reader's professor of neuroscience University of Wisconsin in Madison. And of course, sci-fi-producese. and Book Club Captain Christy Taylor. Thank you so much, Ira. You're all welcome. Until next time, keep on reading. And, hey, we're not quite through yet because if you're in New York,

come to our brainy bird party next week at Caviot August 29th. Caviot August 29th, details and tickets on ScienceFriiday.com slash bird brain. Charles Berkwurst is our director, senior producer, Christopher Taliatta. Our producers are Alexa Lim, Christy Taylor, and Katie Feather. Today we had production help from Lucy Wong,

and our intern is Camille Peterson. Technical engineering help from Rich Kim and Kevin Wolfe. B.J. Leiderman composed our theme music, and of course we're active all week on social media, Instagram, Twitter, wherever, wherever. You know, if you have a smart speaker, you can ask it to play Science Friday whenever you want to. So every day now is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato in New York.