Knowing increases amazement

The starling I knew personally was Max...I think of the years of he lived with us, of his excitements and irritations, his swearing (of the serious but not entirely discernible sort), his sotto voce mutterings, the instant connection be brought to me with a long-ago past. I think of the nature of his character, the exquisite sweetness of his evening solos as well as the extraordinary beauty of the bird, the gilded feathers, the neatness of wing as he flew around the house. After I got to know him, I'd like anew each evening at the cloud of swirling starlings, understanding that each of them was a Max was. Knowing increased my amazement at their individuality, at the magical coordination of their movement, the singular, transcendent beauty of this turning, sweeping cloud of birds. I used to wonder if they looked down from their elevated high-flying towards those of us watching from the pavement, and see only undifferentiated members of another species.

-- from Field Notes from a Hidden City by Esther Woolfson, who I joined yesterday in discussion with Stuart Kelly at Aye Write!

"The purpose of science is not to cure us of our sense of mystery and wonder, but to constantly reinvent and reinvigorate it," writes Robert Sapolsky.

Psychedelic smiley face

The Superb Bird of Paradise:



More here, here and here.

Syrinx

The thrush's song flows from the syrinx buried deep in his chest. Here membranes vibrate and squeeze the air that rushes out of the lungs. These membranes circle the confluence of the bronchi, turning a toneless exhalation into sweet music that ascends the trachea and flows out of the mouth. Only birds make sound this way, using a biological hybrid between the flute's swirling tube of air and the oboe's vibrating membranes. Birds change the texture and tone of their song by adjusting tension in the muscles that wrap the syrinx; the thrush's song is sculpted by at least ten muscles in the syrinx, each one shorter than a grain of rice.

-- David George Haskell

Living colour

A previous post refers the extraordinary colour vision of Gonodactylus and other stomatopods. (If you haven't already listened to Radiolab's singing a rainbow podcast, do). But closer to home than this strange undersea creature there are creatures whose colour vision is amazingly refined compared to ours (though less refined than that of stomatopods): songbirds.

In The Forest Unseen David George Haskell describes vision in the chickadee:

Chickadee eyes...perceive more colors than mine can. I view the [ground] with eyes that are equipped with three types of color receptor, giving me three primary colors and four main combinations of primary colors. Chickadees have an extra color receptor that detects ultraviolet light. This gives them four primary colors and eleven main combinations, expanding the range of color vision beyond what humans can experience or even imagine. Bird color receptors are also equipped with tinted oil droplets that act as light filters, allowing only a narrow range of colors to stimulate each receptor. This increases the precision of color vision. We lack these filters, so even with the range of light visible to humans, birds are better able to discriminate subtle differences in color.  Chickadees live in a hyperreality of color that is inaccessible to our dull eyes.

It may be possible one day, far in the future,  to engineer something like this in humans. At present hallucinogenic drugs offer an impression or illusion that we can perceive colours far beyond the normal realm of experience.  Oliver Sacks [1] reproduces this account from a young man who was a subject in an LSD study at Columbia University in the 1950s or 60s:

The room about me receded into a tunnel of oblivion as I vanished into another world...The heavens above me, a night sky spangled with eyes of flame, dissolve into the most overpowering array of colors I have ever seen or imagined, many of the colors are entirely new -- areas of the spectrum which I seem hitherto to have overlooked. The colors do not stand still, but move and flow in every direction, my field of vision a mosaic of unbelievable complexity.

Sacks reports that a combination of amphetamine, LSD and cannabis allowed him to experience a pure indigo:

It was the color of heaven, the color, I thought, which Giotto had spent a lifetime trying to get but never achieved -- never achieved, perhaps, because the colour of heaven is not to be seen on earth. But it had existed once, I thought -- it was the color of the Paleozoic sea, the color the ocean used to be. I leaned toward it in a sort of ecstasy. And then suddenly it disappeared, leaving me with an overwhelming sense of loss and sadness that it had been snatched away. But I consoled myself: Yes, indigo exists, and it can be conjured up by the brain.

A few months later Sacks briefly experienced 'indigo' again with the aid not of drugs but the music of Monterverdi.

But by whatever means humans induce new experiences of colour in future, there will be a foundational difference between those experiences and the experiences of birds and stomatopods. In the case of the latter two, the capability is an advantage in the pursuit of prey, and has been naturally selected.

Footnote

[1] Hallucinations (2012) by Oliver Sacks quoting from The Drug Experience (1961) by David Ebin.

'As though she lived on song...'

In celebration of 'John Clare day', lines from The Nightingale's Nest:

...melody seems hid in every flower,
That blossoms near thy home. These harebells all
Seem bowing with the beautiful in song ;
And gaping cuckoo-flower, with spotted leaves,
Seems blushing of the singing it has heard.
How curious is the nest ; no other bird
Uses such loose materials, or weaves
Its dwelling in such spots : dead oaken leaves
Are placed without, and velvet moss within,
And little scraps of grass, and, scant and spare,
What scarcely seem materials, down and hair...

Eating songbirds

When the platters of songbirds arrived, everyone would start to chirp. Except for the birds, of course. They would be plucked bare, squeezed between bread and pork, tiny, with the useless stumps that used to be their wings looking like broken arms bent backwards. Mostly, you’d notice their big, empty eye sockets and their beaks.

The beaks were generally the subject of conversation once people started eating: are you or are you not one of those people who eats the beak? The birds were so small and fragile that the usual breast, thigh, drumstick division didn’t apply; people would just hold the beak between their manicured thumbs and forefingers and nosh their way through the entire bird, bones and all. They would say a little rhyme, “Anche la Regina Margherita mangia il pollo con le dita,” (even Queen Margaret ate chicken with her fingers), to excuse themselves before digging in.

-- Clare Mahon

Small miracle

An as-yet-unextinguished marvel in a time of mass extinction:

A songbird weighing just 25 grams makes a 14,500 km journey twice a year. Northern wheatears fly from Alaska, across Asia to sub-Saharan Africa -- one of the longest migrations on record.

-report, paper.

See too A godwit's flight.

'The restaurants are all full'

...said Silvio Berlusconi a few days ago, alluding to the robust health of the Italian economy. One could laugh, were it not for the knowledge that such prosperity as many Italians have recently enjoyed has depended on eating the future -- stealing from children by loading them with debt.

A footnote to this farce: it appears Italian restaurants really are full...of dead song birds.  Traffic, the wildlife trade monitoring network, notes that a consignment recently intercepted on the way to those tables consisted of:

Eurasian Skylarks Alauda arvensis, Calandra Larks Melanocorypha calandra, Red-throated Pipits Anthus cervinus, Bluethroats Luscinia svecica, European Goldfinches Carduelis Carduelis, Fieldfares Turdus pilaris, Mistle Thrushes Turdus viscivorus, Reed Buntings Emberiza schoeniclus and White Wagtails Motacilla alba.