Heroes Not Zombies

I’ve just finished reading Philippe Dubois and Élise Rousseau’s “Petite Philosophie des Oiseaux”. It reminds me a book I read last year – Emanuele Coccia’s “La vie des plantes”. Both books look at a non-human realm of life and use reflections on the lifestyles and life strategies of, in the first case, birds, and in the latter, plants, to stimulate the reader into reflecting on aspects of what it is to be human.
I’ve never read any books like these in English, so they are a validation of one of my main reasons to retire to France from Scotland – to learn another language and explore a whole other way of thinking and living.

Migration

There are lots of fascinating, even astonishing stories about birds in the “Petite Philo…” book. For example, the “bar tailed godwit” (which has a much nicer French name – “La barge rousse” – which migrates back and forward between the Alaska and New Zealand. It flies non-stop 11,000 km (that’s over 6000 miles) in about a week, meaning it flies at 70 km/hr! All that in a bird which weighs only about 300 grams. Can you imagine? How does it fly all that way without stopping even once? Apparently, when it sleeps, only half of its brain sleeps, the other half staying awake. How would you fancy developing that skill? (Mind you only using half your brain isn’t that uncommon – ha! ha!)
Lots of birds migrate of course, and nobody knows how they find their way so precisely that they return to the exact same nesting sites every year. Think of the cuckoo whose parents abandon it into another bird’s nest when it is just an egg, but when ready, the chick flies off and travels to Africa from Europe! How does it know how to do precisely that?
The Artic Tern is the most traveled of all the migrators. Here’s what wikipedia has to say about it –

A 2010 study using tracking devices attached to the birds showed that the above examples are not unusual for the species. In fact, it turned out, previous research had seriously underestimated the annual distances travelled by the Arctic tern. Eleven birds that bred in Greenland or Iceland covered 70,900 km (44,100 mi) on average in a year, with a maximum of 81,600 km (50,700 mi). The difference from previous estimates is due to the birds’ taking meandering courses rather than following a straight route as was previously assumed. The birds follow a somewhat convoluted course in order to take advantage of prevailing winds. The average Arctic tern lives about thirty years, and will, based on the above research, travel some 2.4 million km (1.5 million mi) during its lifetime, the equivalent of a roundtrip from Earth to the Moon over 3 times

When you read something like that it’s kind of hard to hang onto a belief that human beings are the most superior of all the animals. We need our rather flawed GPS systems to navigate. They just do it.

Living in the moment

I think that’s one of the main themes of the book, actually. In one passage they say (and this is my translation, so sorry if it’s not perfect! The Aegithalidae are what we call, in English, “tits”. In French, they are “mésanges”).

But the little tit, does she have any need of the idea of death? No, certainly not. Because making the most of every moment, appreciating every seed she gleans, every ray of sunshine, she does all that already. She doesn’t need someone to teach this truth, she doesn’t need to philosophise: she is already wholly immersed in her life.
The tit doesn’t look forward, doesn’t make plans, doesn’t put things off until tomorrow, doesn’t imagine that things were better in the old days. She lives.

Intelligence

One of my favourite chapters in the one about intelligence, subtitled with a phrase, which, in English, would be “Bird brain!”
When we call somebody bird brained we’re insulting them. But is it true that birds are not intelligent creatures? No!
Just because they have relatively small brains, doesn’t mean they must be relatively stupid. The authors point out that some men have even tried to claim that they are intellectually superior to women because men have bigger brains the women! That hasn’t worked out so well either, has it guys? In fact, birds’ brains have twice as many synapses (connections) in them than the brains of elephants, chimps, or other mammals.
After musing a bit about just what is intelligence anyway? After considering the issue of different kinds of intelligence, including musical and emotional, they describe a number of quite amazing bird behaviours.
Did you know that Blue Jay looks ahead to winter by collecting nuts and seeds and burying them for colder months to come, but if they see another Blue Jay, or other bird, watching them, they’ll pretend to be burying food when they aren’t really?
Some crows have been observed places nuts on the road at traffic lights, when the lights are at red, then when they turn green, the cars run over the nuts to crack them open. The crows wait till the traffic light turns red again, then swoop down to get the nuts.
An experiment done on magpies involved putting a red mark on their brow. When the magpie saw itself in a mirror, it tried to scratch off the red mark.
There are many other examples.

The question the authors ask is shouldn’t we consider that adaptive intelligence, learning how to change your behaviour according to the conditions and environment, actually one of the best kinds of intelligence to have?
As we heat our planet up, fill our oceans with plastic, and our soil with toxic chemicals, it’s tempting to think we’ve got a bit of catching up to do when it comes to adaptive intelligence!