Pigeon Power Napping

Working in a nap can be difficult for birds as well as humans. And naps are important. Even a six minute nap improves a human’s memory. Pigeons need naps too but often miss them. A pigeon can’t take a power nap if there is a predator in the area. But they take naps, as do many other birds and mammals. In nature, napping is normal. In fact, it is the norm everywhere except modern industrialized clusters of humans. And, as we discussed recently, the sleep of birds resembles that of mammals even to the extent of dreaming.

Max Planck Institute Photo of Pigeon Napping

What we call “deep sleep” is that phase of sleeping known as slow wave sleep (SWS) in which neurons oscillate in long and slow waves. Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep is not as deep and it is when dreams happen. More REM occurs at the end of the sleep cycle and more SWS at the beginning.

Scientists will do all sorts of things to experimental subjects, including keeping pigeons awake when they want to be napping. In a recent study at the Max Plank Institute of Ornithology they deprived pigeons of their usual late afternoon naps to see if they made up for it at night. Making up for lost sleep involves spending more time in SWS and even longer and slower wave patterns.

Just as in mammals, the scientists discovered that sleep deprived pigeons make up for the daytime sleep loss by sleeping more deeply at night. Mammals and birds, with entirely different brain structures, seem to regulate sleep in the same way.

Just more evidence that having a large cortex may not be as big a deal as we thought. To put it in the more elegant words of a nuclear physicist,

There is separation in Life but
there is no separateness.
We are all connected.
- David Bohm

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The full citation for the article reporting on pigeon napping:
Dolores Martinez-Gonzalez, John A. Lesku and Niels C. Rattenborg
Increased EEG spectral power density during sleep following short-term deprivation in pigeons (Columba livia): evidence for avian sleep homeostasis.
Journal of Sleep Research (2008), Online Early Articles, February 27, 2008

Here is an abstract of the article.

One Life

Oh go ahead.  Skip reading today’s entry and go outside.  Which is what we did rather than writing today’s post.

Waterson's Calvin and Hobbes on a summer day

The Great Sparrow Wars

Chairman Mao was not the world’s finest naturalist. But he was a man of action. Thinking that four kinds of pests were hindering his “Great Leap Forward” he decided to eradicate them all. Rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows all had to go. Sparrows earned Mao’s enmity because they eat grain and grain seeds and so, Mao thought, disrupted Chinese agriculture. He declared war on sparrows. Literally. He said: “Here is the method — we make our resolution, we coordinate our actions, we divide our tasks, we cut off the food supply, we set up a trap and we continue our battle of destruction.”

Chinese Poster of The Great Sparrow War

From a Shanghai newspaper, December 13, 1958:

“The Whole City Is Attacking the Sparrows.”

” “On the early morning of December 13, the citywide battle to destroy the sparrows began. In large and small streets, red flags were waving. On the buildings and in the courtyards, open spaces, roads and rural farm fields, there were numerous scarecrows, sentries, elementary and middle school students, government office employees, factory workers, farmers and People’s Liberation Army shouting their war cries. . . .In the city and the outskirts, almost half of the labor force was mobilized into the anti-sparrow army. Usually, the young people were responsible for trapping, poisoning and attacking the sparrows while the old people and the children kept sentry watch. The factories in the city committed themselves into the war effort even as they guaranteed that they would maintain production levels. . . .150 free-fire zones were set up for shooting the sparrows. The Nanyang Girls Middle School rifle team received training in the techniques of shooting birds. Thus the citizens fought a total war against the sparrows. By 8pm tonight, it is estimated that a total of 194,432 sparrows have been killed.”

All over China people were banging pots and pans, waving flags and disrupting the lives of sparrows. Sparrow nests were torn down, eggs broken, sparrows and their nestlings killed by the millions. Literally. The People’s Daily exhorted the citizenry, “No warrior shall be withdrawn until the battle is won. All must join battle ardently and courageously; we must persevere with the doggedness of revolutionaries.” Radio Peking played an anthem, “Arise, arise, Oh millions with one heart; braving the enemy’s fire, march on.”

Nobody knows how many sparrows died but the number was in the millions.

Initially, the harvests improved, but too many sparrows were killed. Not enough survived to keep the locusts and grasshoppers in ecological balance. The insects devoured Chinese crops. In the resulting famine more than 35,000,000 people died of starvation.

The Great Sparrow War was over. Mao declared victory and called the whole thing off.

Mostly, the Chinese were killing Tree Sparrows, close relatives of House Sparrows. Tree Sparrows and humans probably started associating with one another about 10,000 years before Mao. It was around that time that humans in the Yellow River Valley began rice farming. It was also when people in the fertile crescent of the Middle East switched from hunting and gathering to farming wheat. What we now call House Sparrows in North America and English Sparrows in Northern Europe began living with those humans about that time. Sparrows and humans have been together ever since. BNA declares, “. . .a sparse population of House Sparrows largely indicates a sparse population of humans.” Said differently, where there are a lot of humans, there will be a lot of sparrows.

The Chinese aren’t the only ones who have tried to kill sparrows off. Mao should have studied North America’s history of trying to eradicate House Sparrows. He would have saved himself a lot of trouble and the crops might not have failed, at least not as catastrophically as they did.

House Sparrows did not live on the North American continent until the mid 1850s when some enterprising, ignorant people imported 100 of them from England to New York City. Helped along by organizations such as the “Cincinnati Acclimatization Society” which thought that the, “enobling influence of the song of birds will be felt by the inhabitants,” the sparrows spread. The sparrows were so successful that an Indiana newspaper declared in 1883, “Let them all be killed.”

We’ll be back with the rest of that tale.

Bird Watching Aptitude Test

We’re sometimes asked, “What does it take to be a good birdwatcher?” Or sometimes an Englishman will ask, “What does it take to be a good twitcher?” Actually, birding doesn’t take much. A desire to be outdoors, suitable clothing, a pair of binoculars and a good field guide is about all that is necessary.

Patience is also required. Sometimes you have to wait for a bird to appear. More often, it is just a matter of  seeing what is already there. To check your “patience aptitude” here is a photo. There is a giraffe in the photo, but most people can’t see it until they settle the mind and calm the body.

Now, you are ready to go birding!

White-wing Doves Evolving

It is rare for a being which is deeply stupid to know it is deeply stupid and want to be smarter. But that dissatisfaction must be how life evolves from lower to higher states of consciousness. White-wing Doves are a case in point.

We’ve watched them try to figure out how to eat bird seed from a squirrel-proof bird feeder. This involves climbing all over the feeder, hanging upside down on it, pecking at it, much head-tilting and a lot of study. Soon, they are going to figure it out.

Last week a friend gave us one of those black pre-molded plastic ponds. We dutifully dug a huge hole for it, down through the rich topsoil in the garden and directly into the cement masquerading as dirt beneath. Following the easy instructions, we then went off to the local supplier of goods for ponds. Much is required: A pump, a fountain, water-lilies, nitrogen-fixing plants, one three-inch fish per each square yard of water surface (two in this case), food for the fish, food for the plants, and other essentials.

We purchased all this and took it home. The plants were fine and the pump worked well; too well, in fact. Our little pond contains about 250 gallons of water and the pump moves 300 gallons an hour which, according to the lady who sold it to us, was what we needed. The pump disagreed, shooting water upward and outward with far too much exuberance. It was moving at least 50 of those 300 gallons right out of the pond.

So we returned to the pond supply place to get something to diminish the pump’s enthusiasm. That turned out to be a diverting valve to which we attached tubing for another water outlet. The tubing is attached to fake turtles, fake rabbits or fake frogs which spout the water from their mouths.

Before investing in a fake turtle, we thought it best to go home to see if the diverter idea worked. It did. The spray was much lower and all the water stayed in the pond. That meant yet another trip to the store for the fake turtle. (The books which assure you that these projects only take, for example, four hours don’t count the fifteen trips to the store to get one more part you didn’t know you needed. Or another water-lily.)

Finally the pond was working. We buried the power cord and drilled holes in the fake wood stump where the fake turtle now sits, gushing water into the pond with a delightful sound.

Then we fed the fish. That interested the Border Collies which are already evolved. They like the fish food and we’re not so optimistic about the long-term survival of the fish either.

Border Collies also like fresh cool dirt. The pile of dirt removed for the pond apparently was not in the right place so, while we were inside, they rearranged the dirt pile, shoveling a lot of it directly into the pond.

They didn’t like the words we used when we discovered that, so they let us bail it out and clean it up by ourselves.

But now the pond is working just fine and everybody is happy. It is attracting all manner of wildlife, including birds and frogs (Or are they toads? I must learn the difference; I’m trying to evolve too.) The Hummingbirds fly into the fountain’s spray and the turtle makes a nice perch if you are a House Finch.

The Mourning Doves enjoy the pond too. Unlike their cousins, the White-wing Doves, they walk right up to the edge and have a drink. But as I said before, the White-wings aren’t very smart and I watched one for ten minutes this morning. It walked nonchalantly around the pond, glancing at it often. Then it climbed up on one of the pieces of sandstone on the edge of the pond, casually lifting and stretching one wing and then the other. Then it backed down and studied the situation for a while. A Mourning Dove walked by and had a drink. The White-wing hopped up on the bucket we used to bail out the pond and studied some more. Then it hopped down and went right up to the edge of the pond but a drop of water must have hit it because it startled and flew off. Half an hour later, it was back; still studying. As far as I know, it still hasn’t had a drink, but I’m confident it will evolve a bit further and solve this problem too.

A New Baby Roadrunner

Nature is abundant. As an eloquent friend says, it is “wildly resilient.” Or as they used to say in France, “The King is dead! Long live the King!” (Later, they got rid of the King so the metaphor only goes so far. Political systems don’t last as long as evolution.)

We lost a baby roadrunner last week. Yesterday, Nature brought us another. We don’t mean “us” in the parochial sense. Nature brought the world, of which we are all a part, another roadrunner because evolution requires abundance of all life forms and because life is wildly resilient. It doesn’t matter whether you are a human being or a roadrunner, “There is a great River of Life flowing through the Cosmos and we are not separate from it.”

Join us for a quick sip from the River. (Click for enlargements)
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Chuck and Baby

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Portrait

Passeriformia Dreaming

When you go to sleep tonight maybe you’ll be like Hemingway’s old man and dream about the lions. Or the snakes. Or being late for a plane. Or flying without an airplane. Or flunking a test. Or any of a multitude of other dreams. But you will dream.

Nobody knows for sure why. We spend about two hours a night dreaming. Freud thought it had to do with subconscious desires. More likely, dreaming is a part of the process of transferring and synthesizing stimuli. It may be an integral part of learning. That may be when we transfer information from the hippocampi to the neocortex for long-term memory.

We’re not the only dreamers. All mammals dream and in ways similar to humans. That’s not a surprise; mammals’ brains are built pretty much the same, with a cortex governing complex processes and behavior. Mammals sleep in stages; successive episodes of slow wave sleep (SWS), intermediate sleep (IS) and rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep. As the night progresses there is relatively less SWS and more REM.

Dreaming occurs during REM sleep when the brain’s cortex is active. That’s why we thought that a cortex was required for dreaming. Birds and reptiles don’t have one and no one has ever caught a reptile or a bird dreaming.

Until recently.

Birds were known to have periods of non-rapid eye movement sleep (NREM) but only very short bursts of REM sleep. Nor were birds known to have a sleep-stage structure similar to mammals.

But now comes news that Zebra Finches, and presumably other passeriformes (songbirds) sleep in stages much like ours and spend time dreaming. Conclusion? Dreaming does not require a cortex.

And that raises all kinds of questions. For instance, if a cortex is not required for structured sleep, why has evolution designed two entirely separate mechanisms for doing just that? If it has, dreaming must be really important. Perhaps we can learn more about our own dreaming from birds’ dreams.

Are bird brains a great deal more complex and capable than we once thought? (The answer to that is almost surely, yes. We’ve already observed similarities in our brains and avian brains at the molecular and cellular level. A cortex may not be such a big deal after all.)

Why have we now seen this type of sleep structure in song birds but not other birds? (Perhaps because songbirds must learn more complicated songs and behaviors? Or maybe we’ve just missed it in other birds? Some parrots and hummingbirds learn vocalizations and they don’t seem to dream.)

Finally, what do birds dream about? And how would we ever know? We can’t even really describe our own dreams. As Marlow says, describing the beginning of his journey into Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,

“It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream — making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment. . . , that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams. . . .No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence — that which makes its truth, its meaning, its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream — alone….”

But not as alone as we once thought.

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The entire scientific paper upon which this entry is based can be read here. From the paper comes this two dimensional view of a computer model of the finches dreaming. Every dot corresponds to three seconds of a bird’s sleep, SWS in blue, IS in cyan and REM in red. (Image courtesy of Dr. Phillip Low, the article’s lead author.)

Falconry in Australia

Baby Roadrunner -RIP

Our sad duty today is to tell you that our [the] baby roadrunner has died.  He [or she] was wounded on the back leg.  We can’t tell whether by a cat or a fence or some other accident.  For a day and a night, he hopped around on his good leg in our enclosed front yard where his Mom and Dad fed him and we supplemented that with water and bits of raw meat.

A local rescue place suggested that we bring him in for examination but here is a fact: One-legged roadrunners are faster than two-legged humans.  Besides, we were afraid that the stress of our chasing him would do more harm than good.  And he seemed to be improving.  He was eating and drinking and, after the first night, he began putting weight on the leg.  The next morning we watched him hunting insects.

But an hour or so later, he was dead.

As we have told you before, a baby bird that gets hurt is far more likely to die than to live.  Infant mortality among birds is enormous and any injury makes it far less likely that a baby will survive.  It is why Greater Roadrunners and many other birds often have two clutches of babies a year.  Survival requires abundance.

We know that we’re not supposed to feel too bad, but he lived in our neighborhood and when he was in trouble chose our front yard.  Moreover, we’re humans; the species which understands the world’s absences, and so we miss him and are sad this day.

Ostriches in Court

Not often do judges get the chance to defend ostriches, but it does happen.

Conrad Black was the CEO of an American corporation (Hollinger) which owned many newspapers around the world. Hollinger was controlled by another corporation (Ravelston) in which Black owned the majority of the stock. By this device, Black controlled Hollinger which paid large “management fees” to Ravelston which, in turn, paid Black a really nice salary. Hollinger (I’m skipping the details) paid Black and others $5.5 million dollars so they wouldn’t open a competing newspaper in Mammoth Lakes, California (Population 7,000) This was fraud. Black and his co-defendants pocketed the money without telling the shareholders of either corporation of this sweetheart deal.

A jury convicted them and they appealed.

Today the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago upheld the jury’s convictions and — at the same time — sprung to the defense of Ostriches.

In criminal law there is what is known as an “ostrich” instruction. Suppose Jack asks Jill to mail a package for him and gives Jill a large sum of money in return. Jill suspects, but does not know for sure, that the package contains illegal drugs, but mails it anyway and pockets the money. Jill, in effect, buried her head in the sand and a jury could convict her for an illegal drug shipment. An “ostrich instruction” tells the jury that to suspect she was committing a crime and then avoiding the suspicion [by not opening the box, for instance] equals committing the crime.

Here is what the court wrote about ostriches:

The first [issue on appeal]is whether an “ostrich” instruction should have been given. The reference of course is to the legend that ostriches when frightened bury their head in the sand. It is pure legend and a canard on a very distinguished bird. Zoological Society of San Diego, Birds: Ostrich, www.sandiegozoo.org/animalbytes/t-ostrich.html  (“When an ostrich senses danger and cannot run away, it flops to the ground and remains still, with its head and neck flat on the ground in front of it. Because the head and neck are lightly colored, they blend in with the color of the soil. From a distance, it just looks like the ostrich has buried its head in the sand, because only the body is visible”). It is too late, however, to correct this injustice.