Julie Zickefoose: Nature Artist & Writer

It is a winter day, and I am standing in the weak lemon sun in Harvard Square, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, waiting to cross a busy street. I look south, down Mass. Ave., and see a city bus approaching. There is a squadron of pigeons accompanying it, flying at the level of the windows. My curiosity is piqued, and I wait out the light to see what happens. An elderly woman slowly climbs down the bus stairs. She carries a cane and a shopping bag. The pigeons descend on her, fluttering noisily as she makes her way to a bench outside my freshman dorm. I'm not surprised to see her pull bread and peanuts from the shopping bag and begin scattering them to her clattery brood. I turn to a passerby who has watched the whole scene with me. "She's here every day at the same time. The birds follow her bus from Boston." I wonder how it all evolved, how the pigeons learned her schedule, her route from her home to the square. And then realize that for a species that is renowned for its precise homing powers, this is a small feat. Peanuts, in fact.

Years later I am renting a small beach cottage in Old Lyme, Connecticut, for the fall. I love fall at the shore, with its biting winds and pounding surf, its leaden skies and keening gulls. I seem to be in the minority. The neighborhood is deserted, its uninsulated cottages empty. Crows patrol the lonely beach. Tame crows. I seize the opportunity to befriend them, and start laying leftovers out on the lawn. I delight in watching the big sable birds caching their treasures in the grass, covering them carefully with wads of sod. My beef stew is a huge hit. Chunks are buried everywhere. The crows quickly learn who the Food Lady is. One afternoon I'm returning from town in my little silver car when I see a crow suddenly reverse its northerly flight to follow me south. Then another, and another. I'm still a mile or more from the cottage. The crows make the right turn into my development, and begin to caw lustily as I turn into the driveway. Not only do they recognize me, but they know my little Colt, and they know when I'm home and when I'm not, and they watch for my return. They've made their point. I head straight for the refrigerator to reinforce their behavior.

The beach crows returned the favor every day, gracing me with their presence. I even got a nice pair of sunglasses from them. Two individuals were tussling on the sand, obviously in play, passing a piece of driftwood back and forth. One gripped it in his foot, an unusual feat for corvids, which, as a family, generally carry objects only in their bills. He tried to walk while carrying the stick, then flopped over onto his side and rolled onto his back, passing the wood from one foot to the other. The second crow stole it, and they wrestled like two pups for a while. A third crow flew in, carrying a pair of sunglasses in its bill, and the game of keep-away continued, with the glasses as the prize. When they were through playing, I picked up the sunglasses. I've long since lost the sunglasses, but I remember my crow friends, and wonder if they remember me. Chances are...

Birds remember. They notice. They observe carefully. It's in their job description to do it. We don't take much notice of their everyday behavior, as a rule; we don't give much thought to whether intelligence is involved in it. When those natural avian aptitudes intersect with our lives, though, we deem them intelligent. In short, the more like us birds behave, the smarter we think they must be.

The ornithological literature is rich with examples of "presumed intelligent" behavior in birds. The Japanese barn swallows who learned to hover before an electric eye and open the warehouse door that would gain them access to their nesting place. The crows who dropped walnuts into a busy intersection, watched the car tires crush them, then waited for the "walk" light to go collect the meats. The green herons who use twigs, feathers, or even fish food to bait their prey. I love reading these accounts, and revel in the oh-so-careful objective descriptions of the observers as they step around the question of whether a bird could truly demonstrate intelligent behavior. And I take great pleasure in collecting some examples of my own. Some have even been deemed of scientific merit.

My then two-year-old nephew Evan and I were happily flaunting the rules one autumn day, feeding ducks and geese at a lake in my mother's retirement community in Richmond, Virginia. We'd no sooner pulled out the plastic bread bags than a great blue heron spread its slaty wings and made a beeline across the lake to our side. Barely 10 feet away, it stood on the shore, looking out of hard yellow eyes at us. It clearly wanted something. Never having been approached by a great blue heron before, I thought fast, and tossed it a piece of bread. It grabbed the bread and ate it. How strange. I hadn't thought herons liked bread. I tossed a second. It picked it up, then dropped it, and kept looking at us. I tossed the next piece into the water, and the heron stepped quickly toward it, as the geese hurried to get out of its way. Now we were getting somewhere. The heron stood, staring into the water beneath the bread, then stabbed, bringing up a fat, flipping bluegill. It moved back to the shore to process and swallow its catch headfirst, then waded back into the water. While it was away, the geese had stolen its bread. The heron turned its head and looked at me again. I tossed more bread to it, until four pieces floated around beneath it.

The geese, emboldened by hunger, drew closer to the heron. It struck at them when they tried to snatch the floating bread. In the course of only 20 minutes, the heron caught three bluegills that were attracted to its bait. When the bread was gone, the heron packed it in and flew off, leaving me to search the literature for any other examples of bait-fishing in great blue herons. It's a behavior that's well known in green herons, and only recently described in tricolored and black-crowned night-herons (see "Fishing With a Great Blue Heron," BWD, July/August 1999). There were none, and my friend Ted Davis, a professor at Boston University, helped me write the incident up for Colonial Waterbirds [J. Zickefoose and W.E. Davis, Jr., "Great Blue Heron (Ardea herodias) Uses Bread as Bait for Fish," 21:87-88]. From the speed with which the heron approached us, and left us when the bread ran out, I doubt it was the first time it had fished with bread for bait. Happily for the science of ornithology, it chose a bread supplier with a special interest in bait-fishing herons!

It's unlikely that the great blue heron learned this behavior by watching other herons. Green herons, a favorite bird of my childhood in Richmond, are vanishingly hard to come by now, and don't inhabit the lake this bird frequented. What is more likely is that the heron noticed that fish are attracted to the feeding frenzy when geese are given bread, and made the mental leap to station itself near bread, protect the bread, and reap the benefits. Not bad for a bird whose brain is probably half the size of a kiwi fruit.

Putting two and two together -- the basic hallmark of intelligence. One of my favorite stories concerns ospreys. I was sketching them one summer, stationed at a nest platform just off a dock near Old Black Point, Connecticut. A neighbor noticed me there, day after day, and came down to talk. We commented on how quickly the birds had acclimated to my presence; after perhaps 20 minutes of cheeping and circling on my initial visit, they accepted me as harmless and went about their business for that and subsequent visits. Since his house overlooked the nest, the ospreys had acclimated to his presence – unless. "If I come out the front door and walk down to my mailbox they don't say a thing. But as soon as they see me put my boots on, they start yelling. I put my boots on way up by the front door, but they know that means I'm going to take the boat out. My boat is moored right next to their nest, and they don't like my messing around there. And they yell at me from the minute I put my boots on until I'm out in the channel." Told this story, osprey researcher and aficionado Paul Spitzer chortled, "Those birdies, they're not as dumb as they look!"

These are only a few of my favorite anecdotes of bird intelligence. They're not particularly unusual or amazing, but they're mine. And then there is the story of Lewis, a yellow-naped Amazon parrot belonging to my friends, writers Jane and Michael Stern. They entrusted me with her care once while they were away on an extended research trip. Now Lewis talks, but she's not what you might call gifted. She shouts and sings and whistles, but she's usually far from putting together a cogent phrase. This particular morning I left her alone while I was preparing her breakfast. When I entered the room, she was pirouetting around on a table with a razor-blade paint scraper in her beak. Her crown and nape feathers were raised to the fullest, her chartreuse tail flared. "Oh-oh!" she crowed. "Don't play with that!" I nearly dropped my tray. When Jane and Michael returned, they told me that, upon being taken from her carrier on her first day in their home, she looked around the room and asked in a soft voice, "Where am I?" She'd never said either phrase before, and never said either one again.

There is probably an explanation, somewhere, for Lewis's appropriate use of English phrasing in these situations. Perhaps on some other similar occasion, she heard someone say the phrases with enough emphasis that they "stuck" in her brain, and she recalled them in the excitement of the moment. I'd like to leave open the possibility that something wonderful happened inside that little parrot's head, for something wonderful surely happened in mine.