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The Genius of Birds QUOTES

The Genius of Birds QUOTES

21 " MIGRATION IS ANOTHER TRADE-OFF. Birds that migrate have smaller brains than their sedentary relatives. This makes sense, as a brain that consumes a lot of energy and develops slowly would be too costly for birds that travel a lot. "

― Jennifer Ackerman , The Genius of Birds

22 " They circle; now dense like a polished roof, now disseminated like the meshes of some vast all-heaven-sweeping net, now darkening, now flashing out a million rays of light . . . a madness in the sky "

― Jennifer Ackerman , The Genius of Birds

23 " If you’re going to invade a new place, a love of novelty helps. So does a fondness for hanging out in groups. "

― Jennifer Ackerman , The Genius of Birds

24 " Every forest has its own character, its own whispered rumors and smells. "

― Jennifer Ackerman , The Genius of Birds

25 " Being a sentinel babbler is a dodgy job—they get picked off much more often than foragers, especially by hawks and owls. But life can be dicey for all babblers. "

― Jennifer Ackerman , The Genius of Birds

26 " The real naturalist should be a Boswell, and every creature should be, for him, a Dr. Johnson. "

― Jennifer Ackerman , The Genius of Birds

27 " most expensive in the body, second only to the heart. Neurons may be small, but they’re costly to make and maintain, consuming about ten times more energy relative to their size than other cells. "

― Jennifer Ackerman , The Genius of Birds

28 " The scientists chalked up the flocks’ greater successes to the odds that they included birds with varying abilities, experiences, and temperaments: “Large groups succeed because they’re more likely to contain a diverse range of individuals,” the team writes, “some of whom will be very good at problem-solving. "

― Jennifer Ackerman , The Genius of Birds

29 " In both proto- and modern birds, on the other hand, the skull maintained its youthful shape as the birds matured, leaving plenty of space for enormous eyes and enlarged brains. “When we look at birds,” says Abzhanov, “we are looking at juvenile dinosaurs.” As it happens, we humans may have pulled just such a Peter Pan–like move. As adults, we share the big head, flat face, small jaw, and patchy body hair of baby primates. Paedomorphosis may have enabled us to develop bigger brains, just as it did in birds. "

― Jennifer Ackerman , The Genius of Birds

30 " in both birds and humans, the brain regions used more extensively in waking hours sleep more deeply during subsequent sleep—another similarity born of convergent evolution. "

― Jennifer Ackerman , The Genius of Birds

31 " Carrion crows use passing cars to crush especially tough nuts, such as walnuts, that won’t break by simply falling on pavement. The now-famous video of these crows in a city in Japan shows one stationed above a pedestrian crossing. When the light turns red, it positions its nut on the crossing, then flies back to the perch and waits while the light changes and traffic passes; when the light turns red again, it flutters down to safely collect the cracked nut. If no car smashed the nut, the bird repositions it. "

― Jennifer Ackerman , The Genius of Birds

32 " Did the crows’ bill shape and specialized vision predispose them to tool crafting and use? Or did their tool-use behavior in response to unusual ecological opportunity—those delicious hidden grubs—gradually shape their visual system and bills? This is the sort of mysterious causal relationship biologists both love and hate. "

― Jennifer Ackerman , The Genius of Birds

33 " In fact, we owe the expression “pecking order” to studies of the social relations among chickens by the Norwegian zoologist Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe, who found that pecking orders are ladderlike, with the top rung conferring great privilege in the form of food and safety, and the bottom rung fraught with vulnerability and risk. "

― Jennifer Ackerman , The Genius of Birds

34 " New research shows that when we recall an event, the place cells in our hippocampus that store the location of that event fire again, helping us to locate a memory in both space and time. This explains why retracing your steps can help you remember what you were looking for. "

― Jennifer Ackerman , The Genius of Birds

35 " Words will do that. We are a naming species, and what we call things influences the way we think about them and the experiments we deem worthy of doing. "

― Jennifer Ackerman , The Genius of Birds