WHAT'S IN A BIRD'S BRAIN?
Rex Burress
Halfway between Oroville and Marysville, I saw a massive osprey nest on a power pole, with the bird sitting on top last spring.
The osprey is dependent on swooping down on surface fish, yet that nest was apparently far away from water in the drought-ridden farmland. Feeding hungry babes takes considerable fishing and fish, and the river was some miles away. I see osprey circling and swooping for fish in the river at Oroville, although mostly on solitary forays, and you always wonder where their home base is during the nesting season. I suspect each pair has a fishing location under their claim.
Why would a pair of ospreys build a labor-intensive nest on a roadside pole so far from water? Auto noise and fumes must be annoying for a wild animal, and the traffic is intense on that section of highway 70.
Out in the fields near the roadside osprey nest, a grove of oak trees has been salted-white with nesting egrets for the last several years. Once there was a similar rookery in the swamp at the Afterbay outlet, but suddenly one year they didn't appear, and there is conjecture that they relocated in that isolated oak grove also far away from a major water source. Another water bird, the green heron, was found nesting out in the hot foothills with only a swimming pool nearby, certainly not sufficient to provide fishy foods to the ravenous brood.
Mighty electronic-minded human engineers are unable to penetrate the brain of a bird, so we don't know for sure what they are planning or thinking. Or do they plan at all? Do they just feel the urge, or the order, to reproduce, migrate, and do their projects instinctively in season?
The bird thing of finding a mate--and actually the mate-search in all animals--is largely a matter of random encounter, aided by various scents and displays. I suppose that is the way for humans, too. Once the bird-mate meeting is made, then comes one of the really mysterious aspects of animal life--the selection of a nesting home!
There are literally millions of building possibilities in trees, shrubs, grass, and around bridges and buildings. Finding a particular place, and making a mutual decision requires brain work, ingenuity, energy, and intense cooperation, whether it is for human honeymooners, or a nest of an eagle, hummingbird, kingfisher, or any of the other 9,000 species of birds. It is a major undertaking. All bird species use a different nest style unique to that pair. One solitary bird cannot do it--a male and a female must work together to create new life. This rings true for nearly all life on Earth. Reproductively, male and male, and female and female, can't do it.
If you've ever watched intently as birds build, especially a pair of tiny bushtits constructing the huge bag nest, chances are you would find it amazing at how many trips they make from finding a twiggy fragment to weaving it into their creation.
Using only their beak, the various stick-builders work for many hours at their job, unless you consider the killdeer that merely snuggles-out a depression in the pebbles. When finally the eggs are deposited in the chosen site, great secrecy is shown until the babes leave the nest. Without roadsigns--or signs of any kind--the parents find their hidden hideaway handily. Orientation within their domain is acute.
The beak is also the only tool a cliff swallow has in gathering gobs of mud to plaster onto the underside of a bridge or on other structures. Bite by bite and trip after trip, the swallow constructs a ceramic-like nest with a jug-shaped entrance. Bank swallows and kingfishers also are dirt birds, digging a tunnel into high banks where they raise the young. It's their way of life.
Among the most astonishing phenomenal feats are the decisions made by migratory birds, such as the snow geese that migrate to the Gray Lodge marshes. They fetter out on flyways, finding their way to an obscure destination as surely as if they were plugged into a GPS with a director giving instructions. Those brain functions are not fully understood, and the birds aren't talking to man the mammal!
“It's impossible to explain creativity. It's like asking a bird, 'How do you fly?' You just do it.”
--Eric Jerome Dickey
“Teach me half the gladness/That thy brain must know,/Such harmonious madness/From my lips would flow./The world should listen then--/As I am listening now.”
--Percy Shelly, “To a Skylark.”