Jennifer Ackerman and David Allen Sibley: National Book Festival 2021

sponsored by the james madison council well welcome to the 2021 library of congress national book festival i am joel achenbach i am a science reporter with the washington post which is one of the sponsors of the festival thank you for joining us today we're going to talk about a couple of amazing books about birds one is by jennifer ackerman it's called the bird way subtitle a new look at how birds talk work play parent and think the other is by david allen sibley what it's like to be a bird from flying to nesting eating to singing what birds are doing and why we will chat for a bit uh the authors and i and then the last 10 minutes of this session it's very short it's only 30 minutes last 10 minutes we will take questions from you so start putting your questions in the queue now please so where are our authors there they are hello jennifer hello david hey thanks for being here um so birds are amazing they um reading your books these are these are science books it's they're about evolution adaptation how the birds interact with their environment and as i was reading the books i was thinking wow i can't believe evolution did that i can't believe this bird exists you know this bird flies over the himalayas this bird flies from the north pole to the south pole and back how is that possible so here's like an easy question for you to start off with just what is the most incredible thing that you've learned about birds or the thing that strikes you like what's what's the well what's the craziest thing you've discovered about birds let's start with jennifer but that's okay okay well i think um probably the most stunning thing for me was just the level of intelligence in birds and the variety of different kinds of intelligence that they have you know spatial intelligence technical intelligence the ability to make and use tools musical um intelligence so it's really um a remarkable range of intelligence some kinds that we ourselves don't possess um they have a really remarkable spatial memories and um and the ability to navigate to to find their way to places they've never been before so it's really um uh i think this this kind of range of intelligence and that was the most remarkable thing for me i have some real favorite um crazy bird stories which i'll i'll get to in a minute i'm sure okay okay yeah so the bird brain we don't use the term bird right anymore they're because they're too smart david yes yeah there's so many things and i learned i learned a tremendous amount working on this latest book and so many of the things that birds do and the things the adaptations that they have evolved are so incredible that i have to say one of the most remarkable and impressive to me among this whole list is um their respiratory system which i had always heard about but never really understood until i had to illustrate it and describe it in a in a simplified way for my book the respiratory system is completely different from ours their lungs don't inflate and and deflate their lungs are fixed like a car radiator and air flows through in one direction all the time and they have a system of air sacs so that air on inhale and exhale the air sacs control the movement of air and on inhale and exhale fresh air is flowing through the lungs so they are constantly getting a supply of fresh air flowing through this fixed lung and since the lung isn't expanding and contracting the membranes can be thinner the transfer of gas is much more efficient than ours so it's safe to say that you have never seen a bird that's out of breath they just don't get out of school let's talk for a second about bird intelligence um the one thing that you mentioned david in in your uh in the beginning of your book is that you were surprised at how sort of thoughtful and improvisational and rich i think you talk about the richness of a bird's life or what it's like to be a burden and um that they're not just you know zombie-like automatons following uh their genetic code that their their life is more complicated than that and and jennifer you did also in your book i mean which is rich with examples of the kind of improvisational creative nature of birds and as i was reading it i was thinking okay so if they got rid of the human beings and maybe the primates on this planet the birds would be building spaceships in about a few million years but jennifer wait we talk a little bit about that and maybe david talk about like like the bird intelligence yeah um well there's so many as i mentioned there's so many different kinds of intelligence um but one of the the things that really floored me in uh researching both of my books the genius of birds and the bird way is the the courtship displays in the bird world they're just unbelievable like our human rituals are you know boxes of chocolates and bouquets of flowers and things they just don't hold a candle to the really weird and wonderful and intelligent courtship displays that some birds have like you know the birds of paradise they do these um really amazing dances and feather displays and um the uh the tropical mannequins they do um uh full 360 degree somersault sometimes working in collaboration with another male to draw a female and then you know their bower birds um of australia new guinea and they build these absolutely gorgeous creations that are made of of hundreds of sticks and then these birds they collect like dozens of colorful and really shiny objects and they lay them out in a very artistic way to impress females so it's it's a kind of artistic intelligence that that was just you know brand new to me um but i think that my favorite example of the um the strange courtship displays of birds and and the kind of intelligence that they involve is is the uh male palm cockatoo which is the it's this big gray parrot with a huge hooked bill and it lives in the rain forests of um of northern australia and when it gets excited when it's courting or when it's you know ready to to draw a mate it raises this wild um kind of flashy head crest and its cheeks get all pink and and then then he makes a drumstick um of his own and he starts to drum against a perch or a tree trunk in a in a special rhythm that's actually uniquely his so you know making a drumstick in itself is a wonder because truly tool making of any kind is very rare in the natural world and almost always occurs in the context of foraging so the pancake two it's the only species other than humans to make um a tool for musical purposes and every male cockatoo has its own you know distinctive signature style of drumming and so the bird's rightfully known i think is the is the ringo star of the bird world it's just really wonderful it's nice david you want to talk a little bit about uh the richness of a bird's life yeah i was one the thing that struck me throughout my research as i worked on this book was how much is going on in the bird's life there's all kinds of examples of studies that find things like that that sparrows when they know that a hawk is around or they they see sign they have some evidence that a hawk might be around they'll stay in hiding and delay feeding until the very end of the day um and that way they'll they they they have to gain weight each day to survive through the night so they'll they'll delay they're feeding so that they they're they stay light and agile and quick to be able to avoid a hawk and then at the last last possible minutes so those kinds of decisions there's so many examples of that that kind of decision making that birds are doing all the time and it made me think that you know my my impression the the simplistic idea of instinct as a sort of um genetic code a computer code that that just directs the birds to to do what they do as robots is is very wrong that there's some much more subtle decision making going on and instinct might provide a sort of template or guidance but the birds make decisions about what to do and that led me to think that our own our own feelings you know how how does instinct then motivate the bird to do what it needs to do um feelings would be a good way to do that so sort of a feeling of satisfaction or a feeling of anxiety would direct the bird or us to to do things that our instinct is telling us to do and i think it just made me think think more in depth about what instinct really is and how it works and um maybe in that way we and birds are not so different that the the feeling of satisfaction that we get from mowing the lawn or or painting the new room before the baby comes home it's that feeling of satisfaction could be uh we talk about it as nesting we refer to it as nesting that that kind of activity and um it's uh it may be very similar to what what birds are doing and and motivated the same way so so a lot of people but it's remarkable both of your books came out right when the pandemic was hitting and and really they were books that people um gravitated toward because as we all remember when the country shut down the traffic stop there weren't very many airplanes and suddenly people are like what's with all the birds wow there's all these birds everywhere people discovered birds and um but it makes me wonder if um you know this is kind of a vague question but how are birds doing we're living in a planet that's being so heavily impacted by human beings um in terms of habitat destruction climate change you know and so on maybe you can both address the question of which birds are most threatened now and what can we do and which ones are going to be fine with climate change because they'll they'll figure out a way to adapt and what should we collectively be aware of in terms of how we can help the birds that are in most most vulnerable to human impacts yeah um boy you know human activity has already caused the extinction of i think a thousand bird species and just in the past five decades or so in north america alone we've lost three billion birds 30 percent of the the bird population and you know so many species are at risk because they can't adapt to the really rapid pace of human induced change in our planet and i think all birds are are probably um affected by climate change and habitat loss but i think um possibly the hardest hit are going to be the birds that are specialists that you know that need a particular niche to survive um tropical species are at risk because you know their ranges are often small and specialized they have a particular zone on a mountain or a particular kind of rainforest and those habitats are changing sometimes they're just being terribly degraded also i think migratory species are really threatened by climate change those you know migratory birds that that travel for very long distances those long distance journeys are really delicately timed for um kind of food blooms that uh that occur at the staging grounds along the way to to the breeding grounds and as earth warms the the kind of two critical timing signals um for birds and their prey that's long length of day and temperature those uncouple and um so what happens is that you know migrating birds might be arriving at at their feeding grounds and it's they're either too early usually or too late um or too late for the uh the bloom of their prey so that's uh um a big threat and um you know i don't know what what what do we do um i think we're all feeling um no yeah yeah i think we're all feeling um really overwhelmed by this i just i read a really terrific um opinion piece in the new york times uh called the debt i think it was the disaster we must think about every day and um in it she says uh it's by tracy cotton and she says you know she says pick a thing you don't have to do the thing that's going to solve everything but just pick a thing so that was helpful to me it's like you know make your voice heard for birds in some way vote for environmentally minded candidates write your congressional representatives to support environmental regulations like endangered species act and the migratory bird treaty act and you know maybe the most important thing is really to try to cultivate a healthy environment wherever you live i would say ditch your lawn and instead plant native species that will attract and support birds also this fall you know birds like leaf litter so don't bother raking um and finally you know if you have cats keep them indoors because predation by domestic cats is really i think the number one human-caused threat to birds in north america um that you know in the u.s alone outdoor cats kill millions of birds every year so that's a very concrete thing you can do thank you david you want to address that yeah what do we do for birds yeah and jennifer's did a great job explaining the whole the whole thing and and with some examples of things to do i agree with all of that i think that i mean for for my whole life we've been really focusing on uh habitat pesticides um those are the risks the the big risks to birds but now climate change i think is the the biggest most sort of overwhelming um threat to birds and as jennifer said the most at-risk species for that are the specialists especially species in in limited climate zones like mountain tops or a certain elevation range in mountains but also coastal species birds of the salt marsh they're living within a few inches of you know horizontal space just above the high tide line is their their whole life and um that's it's already changing um and as sea level rises more and more rapidly they're uh they're gonna have a really hard time finding any place to uh to exist um species that nest on beaches and sand bars um similarly those those places they're more likely you know a storm in june an exceptionally high tide in june will flood the nests and that's that's it for the birds that year it doesn't have to be a the sandbar doesn't have to disappear under the water completely it just just for a couple of hours one one time one high tide and that's happening more and more often so climate change i think is the the biggest single thing to address and that's got to be a big political solution there's lots of things that individual people can do but to focus on something more a little more concrete and at home like jennifer said making your own yard and neighborhood um more hospitable for birds is a really great thing there's lots of lots of information out there about native plantings and the importance of native plants for birds that the native plants have evolved with the the native insects and other invertebrates um so there's a huge community of bird food that lives on native plants and species like norway maple that grow really well here one of the reasons they grow so well is that the there aren't any insects that attack them so um planting oaks native maples um shrubs like service berry um viburnum uh lots and lots of others and and there's lots of information out there about what what will grow where you live um those species of plants will provide lots of food for birds and that um you know as as the birds right now they're making their these incredible migrations all the warblers wood warblers are heading south from canada the northern u.s central us going south to the caribbean central america south america and they need food along the way they're flying all night and then spending a couple of days on the ground um fattening up to make another 300 mile flight in a couple of nights so they if they can find food in in your backyard they'll be a lot happier we're going to go to questions from the audience in just a moment here so just a reminder you can put questions uh in the queue um i want to just uh real just real quick ask you both um we were chatting in the green room you both have such remarkable lives you're able to take something that's a passion which is burning and turn it into such beautiful work and really important work um before we go to questions just real quick jennifer how did you pick the bird way as your next topic after i guess the previous book was the genius of of birds um and then david just maybe you could summarize it you had originally wanted to do a book for kids and this new book evolved from them yeah well i um uh when after i'd finished the genius of birds um which was really about the different kinds of bird intelligence and what we've learned about the the bird brain being um just this real miracle of miniaturization you know it's super efficient it's really dense with neurons and it has these capabilities that we just never dreamed of um and so i got interested in the idea well how are birds actually using um their intelligence in their daily lives and you know as they go about their um their communication their uh raising of their young um and it's so the the bird way really grew out of that um idea so looking at at some of the um quite extraordinary behaviors of birds and how they reveal intelligence one of the the examples that um really stand out for me is stands out for me is the um the kinds of of uh communication that birds are capable of and they they're sophisticated communication that some of their um their alarm calls are just packed with information and um and so the bird way looks at well you know what are birds actually communicating and and how what are some of the subtleties of their messages and are other species of birds understanding what they're saying and it turns out yes they do and um in a way birds can understand foreign languages so um so that's really the uh it was for me really exciting to to um to just explore how birds apply their their um very sophisticated intelligence in in their um in their daily lives and and so david um i know i asked you that question and i'm gonna uh but because we're running short on time i want to go to some questions from the the queue here um and there's a couple of of people who are asking about emotions and david maybe you can uh take this on do you believe all birds have the capacity to emotionally relate or love a mate that is from one person in the audience and there's a similar one from someone else saying are birds aware of each other's emotions so what is the what's it like to be a bird emotionally david uh yeah that's that's a tricky question and um one that i didn't really address and i don't know of any any research that addresses that and it's it's a subject that's been really kind of taboo in science for decades um that um and so and when i say um that i think the feelings that we have could be the stirrings of instinct and similar to um the way instinct works in birds i'm not not directly trying to say that birds feel satisfaction or anxiety or love or other feelings like that only that instinct is motivating them in some way with some some sensation like that so i don't i don't know what birds feel what their experience is in that way and and i don't think anybody anybody can there is one of the things i could talk about how their their experience and jennifer mentioned this their their experience what it's like to be a bird is very different from what it's like to be a human their senses are very different their brains are different um it's a very different experience so whether they have or what i i have a sense that they have some feelings and that's how instinct motivates them but i don't know what those feelings would be and if if we would call them emotions um jennifer do you want to um to take a a shot at that question then there's a question specifically for you after that we only have a little bit of time left but what do you think about birds and their feelings yeah i'll try to be quick here the um there is some evidence that birds um have the sort of foundations of empathy so there's a researcher um named thomas bunyard who works with ravens and he has um determined that the ravens are very social birds and they um have very close allies mates and if a mate or an ally is injured or in some way in a you know a fight the the bird that's associated with that mate or ally will actually come over to the bird preen it twine um bills with it which is sort of the bird equivalent of kissing so there's clearly some effort to console and some understanding that there's been um injury and harm so it's it it's you know whether we call that empathy or not is a question but it is um it it looks like something um something similar to that and i've always believed that um the birds form attachments to their mates um and in and some of them very deep attachments and there is some evidence that that birds can actually understand what's going on um in another bird's mind and some of the mate to mate feeding rituals that go on imply that so so i think we're just at the cusp of beginning to to figure out how to study these questions and they're really fascinating so jennifer there's a question that um someone has has asked you specifically to answer can you comment on this year's mysterious bird plague in the mid-atlantic linked to bird feeders oh yeah so i think there's a lot of controversy about that and david actually might might be able to jump in here too um i i we had to take our own feeders down in in here in central virginia because the of the this very strange disease that was affecting birds eyes and and their behavior and was lethal um and there was some uh thought that it might be tied to the bloom of cicadas um this brood of cicadas that uh the 17 years but i don't actually know the the whether they've settled the mystery david do you know do you have a yeah um well i i know what i've read in in press releases and and sort of write-ups but um it's still a mystery and it wasn't it was never linked to bird feeders as far as i know there was the suggestion to take down bird feeders was as a precaution to help help the birds to socially distance so that they wouldn't be gathering in one place so it wasn't linked to bird feeders the taking down bird feeders was just a precaution to help slow the spread but as far as i know there's still no explanation for it so there's no diagnosis we don't even know if it was a disease it could have been a toxin could have been two or three different things all just coincidentally happening around the same time so it's still a mystery but but thankfully it's it's fading away and um still people are still working on it so there may be some answers um someday but it's um it's still mysterious so we are running short on time here's a question from someone who asks why are pigeons so widely misunderstood and hated i will say i don't hate pigeons um and i i i don't really have any understanding of them at all but um it makes me think about something else that's uh i believe is in your book jennifer is that vultures are widely regarded as bad birds but they're actually good and if you get rid of all the vultures complications ensue that are not favorable um so i don't know this either you want to comment on either pigeons or my question vultures um i'd like to jump in on pigeons because i think they really are maligned um you know they're first of all they're they're fantastic navigators and there's a reason that we have homing pigeons and you know they really are have very sophisticated ways they have a basically a mental toolkit that's kind of the equivalent of our gps our compasses our satellite navigation these birds have this all in their heads and also pigeons are really gifted at making visual distinctions so they can tell um you know the different letters of the alphabet they can distinguish different human faces and they've even been trained to distinguish between um different kinds of tissue in mammograms you know cancerous tissue versus healthy tissue and they can do so um better than a technician so pigeons have lots of tricks up their sleeves that that and i think people just don't like them because they're you know there are a lot of them and they're you know they tend to be in our city environments but uh but i think they're vastly underestimated yeah i'll i'll jump in on pigeons as well that they're i think it's the classic familiarity breeds contempt and pigeons pigeons actually there's a huge number of people around the world who love pigeons um there are hundreds of different uh breeds of pigeons that have been created by pigeon breeders and and pigeon racing is still popular it's so there's a a pretty big number of people who actually love pigeons love pigeons well listen our time is up i want to say uh first of all to the people out there thanks for watching this and to jennifer and david thank you for taking the time to talk about your books congratulations on these books they're really wonderful they are truly marvelous in the literal sense they're full of marvels of nature and so that's going to wrap it up for us thanks everyone for for being here thank you thank you you

Channel: Library of Congress

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Length: 31min 32sec (1892 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 22 2021