Stray Feathers From a Bird Man's Desk

Part 1

Transcriber Note

Text emphasis denoted as Italic.

STRAY FEATHERS FROM A BIRD MAN'S DESK

STRAY FEATHERS FROM A BIRD MAN'S DESK

By Austin L. Rand

CURATOR OF BIRDS, CHICAGO NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM

WITH CARTOONS BY RUTH JOHNSON

DOUBLEDAY & COMPANY, INC., GARDEN CITY, N.Y., 1955

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 55-5254

Copyright, 1955, by Austin L. Rand © All Rights Reserved Printed in the United States At the Country Life Press, Garden City, N.Y. First Edition

CONTENTS

PAGE Introduction 9 Birds Using Tools 15 Birds as Brigands 19 Birds Bathing 22 How Birds Anoint Their Feathers 25 Traveling Birds' Nests 28 Maladaptation in Birds 31 Feathered Baby Sitters and Co-op Nursery Nests 35 Birds' Nests and Their Soup 38 Walled Wives of Hornbills 42 Buried Eggs and Young 45 The Snowy Owl as a Trade Index 48 Monkey Birds 51 Bird-Made Incubators 54 Cormorant Fishing 57 The Shrike's Larder 60 Bird Flavors 63 How Many Feathers Has a Bird? 66 Last Year's Birds' Nests 69 Symbiosis--Animals Living in Mixed Households 73 Bird Apartment Houses 77 Bird Helpers at Nesting Time 81 A Name for a Boat 84 Weavers and Tailors in the Bird World 88 Social Parasites among Birds 91 Fish Eats Bird! 95 Crows Are Smarter Than "Wise" Owls 98 Tame Wild Birds 101 Birds as Pilferers 104 Hibernation in Birds 108 Snakeskins in Birds' Nests 111 Co-operation by Birds 117 Watchdogs at the Nest 121 Bird Guides to Honey 124 Oxpeckers 127 Wings in Feeding 130 Instrumental Music of Birds 133 Conditioning in Birds 136 Poisonous Birds 140 Kingfishers on the Telephone 143 On Identifying Sea Serpents 147 Conservation over the Telephone 151 Birds Washing Food 154 How Animal Voices Sound to Foreign Ears 157 Sight Identification 160 Green Hunting Jays Turn Blue 164 How Birds Use Cows as Hunting Dogs 167 Early Bird Listing 171 Battle of the Sexes and Its Evolutionary Significance 173 Water in the Desert 177 Bird Graveyards 180 Animal Gardens 183 Dropping Things 186 Learning by Birds 189 Can Birds Count? 192 Courtship Feeding 195 They Turned the Tables 198 Survival of the Unfit 201 Dust and Snow Bathing 204 Decoration in the Home 207 Curiosity in Birds 210 References 213 Index 221

INTRODUCTION

In looking back over the preparation of these sketches I feel as though each evening I'd gathered up the bits and pieces left over from the day's work and fashioned them into designs for my own amusement and the edification of my family. Truly it's as though I'd used stray feathers, fallen from the bird skins I'd handled, and fitted them together into something of wider interest than the original.

Much of my work now is museum research, working with bird specimens and books. In fashioning a research paper I always amass a great deal more material, that is to say, information and ideas, than I am able to use in it. In place of a lumber room I have a set of files with index headings that range from Abundance and Age, through such headings as Beauty, Feathering of Feet, Fictitious, Hysteria, Pterylography, Social, Song, Tail Feathers, Valentine's Day, to Zoogeography. Here I put the information that is irrelevant at the moment but too interesting to discard. Its source is varied. Some has been accumulated while studying specimens from localities as geographically separated as Alaska, El Salvador, Gabon, Tristan da Cunha, Nepal, Negros, and New Guinea; and while writing papers that range from describing new species to discussing secondary sexual characters and ecological competition. Some have been recorded while in the field on expeditions, trips that ranged from two years in Madagascar, three expeditions in New Guinea, and a season in the Philippines to trips nearer home from the Yukon to Nova Scotia, Florida, and Central America.

Gradually information builds up under each heading, and new ones are added. These items are too interesting to remain buried in the files. They are things people want to know about. So I began to draft them into articles for publication in the museum's monthly, The Chicago Natural History Museum Bulletin. The response was gratifying. The press picked them up and reprinted them. One was used in a Chicago Tribune editorial. Several were used in commercial radio programs. Encouraged, I prepared more, soon overrunning the space available in the bulletin.

Most scientific papers are not written to be read for enjoyment. Conciseness as well as clarity are striven for, conveying certain information in a small compass. The correlations made are often obscure ones, appreciated only by scientists. Yet the material they contain is often intensely interesting, and if these papers were written in a more leisurely style, with more general correlations pointed out, they would provide both interesting and entertaining reading. In a few cases my own research falls in this class, and I've rewritten some of my own papers with this in mind (see "Battle of the Sexes and Its Evolutionary Significance").

This collection of articles, if it were a painting, could be called a conversation piece. Or it might be compared to a well-filled whatnot. Each of the sixty chapters is an independent unit, illustrating some facet of birds, their behavior, or our study of them. Some of the facts may seem unusual or bizarre, but most of them are well known and well documented. The thing that is new, if there is anything new, is the setting in which I've placed them, the manner in which I've looked at them. Taken as a whole, they touch on many different birds from many different places in their less widely known aspects, and with a human interest slant.

"But what will your professional colleagues say?" asked a friend as he flipped through the cartoons. "These pictures don't approach the subject in a very serious manner." Quite true. But a discipline must be very lightly rooted indeed if it can't stand a few caricatures and cartoons and perhaps be the better for them.

The knowledge of most people about the hornbills of tropical Africa, the gulls of Australia, the penguins of Antarctica, and the crocodile birds of the Nile is probably pretty vague. To give a frame of reference in a biological sense is impractical in the compass of one slim volume.

But a ready-made frame of reference already exists: the parallels in bird and in human. These I have used. But in so doing I am not imputing human motives and attributes to birds. The actions are similar. The workings of the human mind I understand only vaguely; that of the bird I can study only through the actions of the birds. One set of behavior may be learned and rational, one rigidly innate, entirely instinctive, and inherited, or at most modified by experience. Be that as it may, the similarity in the end result in two such different vertebrate animals as man and bird when faced with similar problems is often close. Perhaps it is because the solutions are necessarily few; perhaps, and I incline to this feeling, it helps illustrate one aspect of the close relationship between all animate nature.

This series of articles is intended to be interesting and entertaining. I hope it will also make more people aware of the many ways birds act, here and in far places, how they have solved their problems and profited by their opportunities.

STRAY FEATHERS FROM A BIRD MAN'S DESK

BIRDS USING TOOLS

Man is the tool user pre-eminent in the animal world, but he does not stand completely alone in this. Here and there, in quite different groups of animals such as insects, mammals, and birds, a few kinds have forged a little ahead of the rest of their near relatives and show the very beginning of tool using.

The song thrush of Europe is perhaps a borderline case. It feeds in part on snails. To get the soft edible animal out of its shell, it carries or drags the snail to a favorite rock, its anvil, and there hits it against the anvil until the shell is broken and its contents exposed. The question is, can this be considered as using a tool? If the song thrush moved or prepared the rock, which it does not do, there would be no question that it was a tool. The sea otter brings a stone from the bottom of the ocean and places it on its floating body to use as a similar anvil in cracking hard objects, and this undoubtedly is the use of a tool. At the other extreme are many species of birds that beat their prey on branch or ground, wherever they happen to be. The song thrush is certainly an advance over that, and can, I think, be considered as using a tool in a primitive way.

A few other species, too, bring shellfish to special places. Gulls on our coasts pick up mussels and clams and, flying over a rock or some other hard surface, drop the shellfish, and follow it down. If the shell is broken, the dish is ready for the gull; if the shell is not broken the gull takes the shellfish up to a higher altitude and tries again. In places where hard-surfaced roads are conveniently located gulls have learned to use them as shell-breaking places, and such roads become littered with shells.

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