Tamed and Untamed

by Sy Montgomery

— Sy —

  I’ve always loved to dance, whether in aerobics class or a friend’s basement, in massive marathons or alone. But a partner makes dancing way more fun—especially when your partner is a parrot.

  One of my favorite dance partners ever was a sulfur-crested cockatoo named Snowball.

  “He loves to dance,” his owner, Irena Schulz, told me when I phoned her to arrange a visit. “He’s like the Energizer Bunny. He keeps going and going and going!” When I traveled to Indiana to meet him, I would experience Snowball’s energy firsthand.

  I’d first learned of Snowball on YouTube. From the moment it was posted in 2007, the little movie of the white parrot with the yellow crest dancing to “Everybody” by the Backstreet Boys went viral. Snowball came to Schulz as a rescue (she runs Bird Lovers Only parrot rescue in Duncan, South Carolina), but today he’s a celebrity. Since his YouTube debut, he has danced on The Tonight Show, The Late Show, and Good Morning America and made many more videos.

  If you watch Snowball dance, you can’t help but smile. Bobbing his head, throwing his crest, high-stepping with his feet, the parrot is clearly having a blast. But he doesn’t just enjoy dancing: He is good at it. Thing one to get right with dancing—far more important than grace or style or originality—is syncing with the beat. (Ever dance with someone who couldn’t do this? Awful!) This is what most interested me about Snowball’s dancing, because it bespeaks a quality of mind that most researchers had assumed belonged to humans alone.

  Perceiving rhythm is an act so natural to us humans that we tap our feet to music without realizing it. But it’s actually a sophisticated cognitive feat with a fancy scientific name: beat perception and synchronization. And it’s similar in many ways to skills we employ when we use language. After all, as Tufts University Professor of Psychology Aniruddh Patel points out in his book, Music, Language and the Brain, both music and language are composed of strings of organized sound, full of meaning for both performer and audience. Both powerfully affect emotions. Both have richly structured patterns of rhythm.

  For our first dance I selected a favorite song I hoped Snowball would like: “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” performed by the Tokens. The beat captured Snowball’s interest immediately. Snowball stepped onto Schulz’s hand for the short ride to the back of the gray swivel chair that is his favorite dancing platform and brings him roughly eye level with his people. His yellow crest rose high; his dark brown eyes shone with excitement. He bobbed his head enthusiastically as he first raised one leg, then the other, in time to the beat. Schulz and I joined in, dancing a version of the Pony. Because I was new, Snowball kept his eyes on me. Was he following my movements, I wondered? No—I am quite sure it was his idea to wave his left claw twice, then his right one once, while bobbing up and down and leaning slightly to one side. By the end of the second song we danced together (“Come Back to Me” by David Cook), I was certain: It was I who was following him.

  How can I be so sure? Because Schulz’s husband kindly videotaped that second song and emailed it to me. Watching a video can show you details you miss when you’re experiencing the event real time—as Patel, the specialist on music and brain, well knows. Patel, too, came to watch Snowball dance, but it was the videos that yielded the most insights.

  Patel videotaped Snowball dancing to the same song in different tempi. He then played the videos in sixty-frames-per second time resolution and then had them scored, with the sound off, by coders who didn’t know which tempo was being tested. Colleagues also analyzed a video of birds moving to a beat (you’d be surprised how many dancing birds are on YouTube!), with the same results. His shocking conclusion: Birds are indeed capable of syncing to the beat of music, an ability previously thought to belong to humans alone.

  This shows us that parrots, and probably all birds, “are hearing the world in a very complicated way, similar to the way we do it. It’s suggestive of complex thinking,” Patel says. “Only certain types of brains” can perceive, create, anticipate, and sync to the beat of musical patterns.

  Ancient tales, in endless variation all over the world, claim that birds taught humans to talk, to sing, and to dance. The Fang-speaking people of Cameroon claim African grey parrots brought speech to people as a gift from God; the Kachin of Burma still reenact bird-taught dances today. Music and language may be considered glories of human culture, but their twined evolutionary roots run far deeper than our short human history.

  For me, watching the video Schulz’s husband had made of Snowball and me confirmed what I had felt at the time: Never before had I synchronized so effortlessly with a dance partner. I didn’t know the second song—Schulz’s spouse had picked it—so I expected my own dancing to be a little clumsy. It was not. We moved together as if in a mirror. And no wonder: I was taking my cues from a virtuoso.

  Puffin M

  — Sy —

  “Oh no!”

  These words seldom signal good news, but coming from my stoic husband from his home office upstairs, I knew something was seriously wrong.

  “What happened?” I called up to him.

  “I just got this about Puffin M,” he said, coming down the stairs to share his distress.

  He had just opened the envelope from Audubon Project Puffin’s seabird restoration program. “I am sorry to report that Puffin M did not nest on Egg Rock in 2015,” read the letter. “He was seen ashore only once—atop the Razzo Rock Loafing Ledge on July 12, 2015.”

  Puffin M was missing and presumed dead.

  Now we were both upset. I had never met Puffin M, yet I felt I knew him. My husband had “adopted” him for me as a birthday present starting in 2013. As a result, for the past two years I had received a photo of the handsome little black-and-white fellow with the distinctive clownish red-and-yellow beak, a biography of the bird, plus a detailed summary of his activities on Eastern Egg Rock, Maine.

  A number of savvy conservation organizations, animal rehabilitators, and zoos use animal “adoptions” like this to raise money to support their worthy causes. We also sponsor a twenty-three-year-old female Atlantic white whale named Calvin through the New England Aquarium. You can “adopt” a snow leopard through the Snow Leopard Trust; an orphaned orangutan through Orangutan Foundation International; a shark through Shark Angels; and just about any other creature you can imagine. Just google “adopt a ___” and fill in the blank.

  For me, adopting a puffin was the perfect present. I’ve been a puffin proponent ever since I first learned about Project Puffin’s efforts to restore the birds to their historic nesting islands in the Gulf of Maine. Back in 1973 only two nesting colonies in Maine survived; the rest had been killed a century before. But that year ornithologist Stephen Kress came up with the maverick idea to transplant baby puffins (adorably called pufflings) from Canada to Eastern Egg Rock off Maine in hopes that, years later, they would return to nest there. Enticed by decoys and audio recordings, the first four pairs returned to nest in 1981; now a thousand puffins raise their young on five Maine islands.

  I’d tried to get out to see the puffins but was foiled by bad weather. But now, thanks to Puffin M, at last I had my very “own” puffin to follow—even if I couldn’t visit him.

  Because of the long-term research on Eastern Egg Rock, I knew more about Puffin M’s genealogy than my own grandparents’. M’s parents, Y54 and MR314, had one of those May–September romances: Y54 was twenty-three years old; MR314, only six. But it was a successful pairing. When Puffin M hatched on June 20, 2000, in Burrow Number Three on the south end of the island, he became what would be the eldest of nine pufflings his parents raised over their eight years together.

  Puffin M himself was a late bloomer. He didn’t breed until age seven—two years later than normal. That was in 2007. It took seven attempts before he and his mate raised a puffling. But when it finally happened, I was able to read about it in more detail than a gossip magazine could dish.

 
“Researchers first spotted M on June 3 at the O Burrow entrance in the Big Boulder Jumble area on Egg Rock,” I would learn.

  On July 4 an unbanded female, M’s mate, was seen delivering food to the burrow where the couple was raising their single puffling.

  “On July 25, M delivered a single large herring to the burrow. . . .” Why do details like this so delight us? Why is it more fun to adopt a particular, named animal than to simply make a donation for conservation of a species?

  Because, as researchers confirm, no matter the species studied—be it puffins or snow leopards or even sharks—animals are individuals, just like we are. And their stories can be as compelling as our own.

  It’s through stories about individuals that we make lasting connections. Ideas interest us; individuals move us. It’s hard to imagine saving a whole species. But helping one individual? That’s something anyone can do.

  Puffin M’s disappearance was surely even more upsetting news to the researchers at Project Puffin than it was to my husband and me. They knew him since he hatched. He mattered to them, not only as a precious and unique individual but as a member of a colony that staged a hard-won comeback—a comeback now facing new threats: Besides invasive plants and human disturbance, global climate change can profoundly affect the abundance of tiny herring and hake that pufflings need to survive.

  So along with the bad news in the letter came a plea, signed by Stephen Kress himself: “We hope you will continue to support our efforts by letting us assign a new puffin,” he wrote.

  You bet we will—and for me, that’ll guarantee another very happy birthday.

  Chicken Indestructible

  — Sy —

  On one of the coldest, darkest nights of January, our oldest chicken did not come home.

  During all four seasons our flock of hens, collectively known as “the Ladies,” range freely over our property (and that of our next-door neighbors—who for years kept cracked corn in their shed to feed our hens by hand). As evening approaches, the Ladies always return to the barn. Usually by sundown they’re sitting on their perches, waiting for me to deliver their dinner of grain and scraps, stroke their feathers, and close the door to their coop, protecting them from night predators.

  But on that freezing Friday night, my senior hen was missing. A member of the heritage Dominique breed—the ancestor of the Barred Rock—she was the last of a clutch of chicks who had arrived at our house, still egg-shaped fluff just a day old, more than eight years earlier. The average life of a pet chicken is only five or six years. (Though one I read about, a Red Pyle bantam named Matilda, reportedly lived to sixteen.) The Old Lady was a survivor, and while I love all our hens, I especially admired her.

  Being a free-range chicken is risky business in New Hampshire. This past fall we’d lost another Dominique to a goshawk. In previous years other predators on our flock have included skunk, fox, mink, ermine, and neighbors’ dogs. The Old Lady, in fact, knew what it was like to be in the mouth of a fox. On a summer day five years ago, alerted by the flock’s distress calls, I had raced to her aid, screaming at the fox, who dropped her at the end of a Milky Way of white and black feathers. Eventually her bite wounds healed, her feathers grew back, but a broken, twisted toe remained forever after a testament to her brush with death.

  Lately she had been showing her age. She was menopausal. Her crippled toe pained her, and she walked slower than the others. And though she still relished hunting for bugs and dust bathing in the barn’s dirt floor, she had started sleeping in one of the nest boxes rather than perching next to her best friend, a bossy Black Australorp who pecked at all the spring chickens until they ran away squawking.

  I called and looked for her everywhere that night but eventually gave up. Reluctantly I closed the small coop door to keep the other Ladies safe and warm, but I left the larger barn door open and the light on should she return.

  Sometimes a hen will spend a night out on her own. Perhaps she was napping elsewhere when I closed them in; perhaps she saw a predator and was hiding in thick bush. Usually the straggler is back by morning. But the Old Lady was not.

  Then I got the news of the wildlife sightings on our street. A friend a few houses down reported that she had seen, in her yard, two fishers—large weasels strong enough to kill house cats (though analysis of stomach contents has shown they do this less often than people think). The same day, she saw a goshawk and an owl—fighting! Later that weekend the same neighbor saw a bobcat in her driveway. “Now I know what happened to my missing chicken,” I wrote on her Facebook page.

  I knew our elderly hen was done for. She was ancient; temperatures each night had dropped way below zero; and the neighborhood was crawling with predators. It was pointless to even look for a carcass. I kept the other Ladies closed in.

  And then on Monday afternoon, when I went to bring the cooped-up flock some arugula and cottage cheese to alleviate their boredom, there she was: None the worse for wear, the Old Lady was standing right in front of the coop door, clucking loudly.

  How had she survived?

  There are many answers to this question, but 8,325 of them are surely feathers. (That’s the number of feathers a very patient person counted on a Plymouth Rock hen.) Made of the same protein, keratin, as fingernails, hair, horns, and hooves, these elaborate, heat-trapping structures are “the lightest, most efficient insulation ever discovered,” writes conservation biologist Thor Hanson in his book Feathers: The Evolution of a Natural Miracle. The average songbird has 4,000 of them; the tundra swan, 25,000. Feathers are the reason even the smallest, most delicate-looking songbirds don’t freeze in the winter. Biologist Bernd Heinrich, professor emeritus at the University of Vermont, once calculated the difference between the temperature beneath the feathers of a tiny North Woods bird called a golden-crowned kinglet and the subzero outdoor nighttime air: The bird can be 140°F warmer! No wonder we make our best parkas and comforters from bird down.

  But there’s another reason, I think, that the Old Lady survived that long freezing weekend among a gauntlet of predators. And that is that the Old Lady is smart.

  Chickens in general are smarter than most people realize. An individual chicken can recognize and remember more than a hundred different chicken (and presumably human) faces; experiments confirm they have a great affinity for spatial learning, even in the absence of obvious landmarks. But each chicken is an individual, and some are smarter than others.

  The Old Lady, I think, was one of the smartest. She had clearly outwitted me, a tool-using primate with a brain that outweighed her entire body. It had snowed lightly every day that weekend and also the day she returned. Though I had looked for her extensively, only later did I figure out, thanks to the lack of chicken tracks in the freshly fallen snow, where she’d been that weekend: tucked safely into an old pile of hay in the back of the barn—where she left me one giant egg, frozen solid.

  Hawk Migration

  — Sy —

  My understanding of raptors changed forever on the day a hawk first landed on my fist.

  Her name was Jazz. She was a four-year-old Harris’s hawk, a species native to the desert Southwest, but she was living at the New Hampshire School of Falconry in Deering, where I was taking a lesson. At the toot of a whistle, the powerful bird of prey flew toward my outstretched arm. Her wings, spanning nearly four feet, blew back my hair at her approach. It made my heart sing.

  Smack! Her huge yellow feet and ebony talons gripped my leather-gloved hand with shocking strength. Then she began the work for which her kind is named. Birds of prey—raptors like Jazz—are meat eaters, and the reason she had flown to me was to eat the piece of cut-up partridge that was waiting for her there. Her piercing, mahogany eyes focused on the job of tearing into the flesh with her sharp beak and feet with an intensity stronger than rage and brighter than joy. Inches away from my face, I beheld in this bird of prey a pure wildness more blindingly ali
ve than I had ever before seen.

  But here’s the most amazing thing: Each fall and spring, not far from your house, thousands of birds of prey of dozens of different species may be flying over your head.

  Where we live in New England, the fall migration of day-flying raptors—hawks, eagles, peregrine falcons, kestrels, kites—is one of our great wildlife spectacles. Yet most people never notice them. And fewer still realize who these birds really are.

  They are tigers of the air.

  Though many birds hunt—robins eat worms all summer, after all—raptors are the only birds who are exclusively predatory. They are such good hunters that they used to hunt and eat our ancestors. Recently, reexamination of a famous fossil hominid, known as the Taung Child, discovered in South Africa in 1924, concluded that the three-year-old was not killed by a leopard as previously thought but by an ancient relative of the crowned hawk-eagle. (The modern hawk-eagle still hunts monkeys in the same way.)

  Wild raptors don’t hunt children today, and you’re in no danger. But to capture prey that may be large, fast, and smart, birds of prey employ powers that should leave us in awe.

  They literally see the world in a different way than we do.

  All birds need excellent eyesight to fly; but in birds of prey, who hunt on the wing, the sense of sight is developed to a superpower. An eagle flying at a thousand feet can spot a rabbit across a distance of nearly three square miles.

  In birds of prey, the eyes weigh more than the brain; they have better distance perception than other birds. With forward-facing eyes, they have binocular vision like ours, only better. Fields of view of the left and right eye overlap—which allows the raptor brain to calculate distance instantly by comparing the different images from each eye.

  Such accurate eyesight is essential when you might be diving upon your prey, as does a peregrine falcon (the fastest bird on earth), at more than two hundred miles per hour. But during the autumn, raptors are displaying not only speed but also endurance. Migrating eagles and hawks may cover more than two hundred miles a day on their autumn journey to Central and South America.