• A woman lived near the mouth of a canyon in a rural area of Colorado. She was working outside in her yard when she heard a raven squawking from somewhere up the canyon. As she continued to work, the raven grew closer and closer, squawking up a racket all the while. Finally the sound of the raven’s calls was close enough that she decided to go investigate. And there she spied a cougar, only 20 feet away, getting ready to pounce on her. She screamed for her husband who came racing out of the house, scaring the cougar away. “Thank goodness for that raven calling out and warning me!” she exclaimed, and the story went out in the newspapers, carrying the heartwarming story of how the calls of a raven warned a suburban woman of the imminent danger of a cougar. Later, an ornithologist explained that ravens often team up with large predators such as cougars in order to lead them to potential prey, so that the raven can feast on the leftovers. It’s far more likely, but much less newsworthy, that the raven saw the woman as a meal.
• In Britain in the 1930s, milk was delivered to the door with each bottle sealed with a crimped paper lid. The milk was not homogenized, so the cream always rose to the top. Suddenly the local dairy started fielding complaints that the cream was being stolen from the milk bottles while they were on the doorstep. Local birds called blue tits make their living by peeling back bark on trees and eating bugs they find beneath. In captivity, they will peel back wallpaper in search of bugs. At some point, one blue tit peeled back the paper lid on a milk bottle and discovered cream beneath. When another blue tit watched the first blue tit do this, it learned to do the same – and soon the entire blue tit community was stealing the cream from every porch in town – and then, every porch in England. It took ten years for the dairy to design lids that could not be raided by blue tits.
• Songbirds are born with a genetic program of what song they should sing, yet they are unable to learn the song if they don’t hear it being sung. Cowbird chicks are born with the imprint of a cowbird song, but because cowbird eggs are laid in other bird’s nests, the chick is also imprinted with ability to mimic other bird’s songs so that they are not identified as imposters by their foster parents.
• Carotenoids are the pigments that give plants their color, such as turning tomatoes red and carrots orange. Birds with brightly colored feathers tend to eat more carotenoid-rich foods, compared to birds of the same species that do not. Dull colors on a bird that should be brightly colored indicates that the bird is either in ill health, or is not having much luck finding or competing for food. A female will always choose the male with the brightest colors.
• Likewise, a male bird who can sing enthusiastically for long periods of time indicates a bird in better health than one who cannot sustain the concert for very long.
• Up to a quarter of eggs in any given bird nest may have been fertilized by a male inhabiting a neighboring nest. Apparently the female likes increasing her chances of raising babies that have the right set of genes.
• There are about 200 species of a small bird called the tit. The males of one species sport a black stripe on their chests. The birds who have a wider stripe make better parents to nestlings, and females choose the males with the widest stripes.
• A bird’s eye takes up about 50 percent of its head; our eyes take up about 5 percent of our head. To be comparable to a bird’s eyes, our eyes would have to be the size of baseballs.
• The chicken is the closest living relative to the Tyrannosaurus Rex.
