The Sparrow and the Feather - Accounting for Thought.

 

All kinds of things can trigger deep thoughts in me, many of these thoughts are often nonsensical and sometimes not suitable for broadcast but quite often a chance observation will lead me down a rabbit hole into areas I never considered before, one such event occurred this past week.

Mr Sparrow (c) M. Smith

I was sat in my back garden watching the comings and goings of the local bird life. As is often the case I was drawn to the activity of the local sparrows how mob the garden in little ‘wannabe’ gangs chattering excitedly like school kids or squabbling, well like school kids too. They are social birds and seem to have an enthusiasm for life, they strike me a plucky and at times self-important. I was pondering their character when I was drawn to a particularly dapper male Sparrow who had landed on the fence with a feather firmly gripped in his beak. This was an exciting turn of events. Sparrows nest well in my area and use a nest box on the side of the house. Last year I installed a camera to one of the terraces rooms and unsurprisingly no sparrow decided to use it. This year I hoped for more success although at present the camera does not seem to be working! Perhaps if I watched this male, he would reveal which box they were going to use this year?

He seemed incredibly proud of his feather. He stood boldly on the fence waving it around and repositioning it in his beak to gain maximum purchase in the light breeze. He was pleased to have found himself such a premium piece of nesting material, I was surprised then when his behaviour suddenly changed. As he looked around him, no doubt looking to display his find to receptive females and brag to the other males his gaze alighted on the bird feeder. Instantly his demeanour changed, he dropped the feather and fluttered down to one of the perches. He stuck his head in and took a few beak fulls of seed before flying off. He did not look for his lost feather or even show any awareness that he had even had one in the first place. It was if seeing the food overrode his previous behaviour and excised it from his awareness.

So, what then was going through the sparrow’s mind. It led to me to think about the depth of intelligence such an animal might have. Was the sparrow just a flesh and blood automaton operating purely on an innate system of stimulus and response pathways, on the larger scale is that all that we humans are? Had I seen evidence of two competing innate systems going head-to-head in a priority led battle for survival?

The sparrow, I reasoned, had received the signals of day length and temperature, and responded biologically with hormonal changes to begin the mating sequence. Mating is a strong imperative in all species and particularly in humans can lead to levels of extreme stupidity. The sparrow had started nest collecting behaviour, the collection of the feather was evidence of this, and he had done well. The feather was A grade nesting material, with excellent thermal properties and incredibly soft, Mrs Sparrow would be impressed. However, had the sight of food initiated a different neural pathway that prioritised survival over reproduction, you cannot after all, reproduce if you have starved to death!

Mrs Sparrow (c) M.Smith

During my undergraduate dissertation I studied optimal foraging theory in woodland birds and whilst the outcome of my studies were embarrassingly naive it did leave me with some insight into the complex cost benefit analysis birds undertook to balance energy gain and energy use on a daily, even on a minute-to-minute basis. What then of choice and intelligence? Was a measure or mark of intelligence the ability to choose to override an innate response. Was this what humans did? Was this ability, this flexibility, a competitive advantage that allowed other organisms to survive in new and exciting ways?

Ironically, the New Scientist has just run an article on animal intelligence, I had just finished reading Peter Godfrey-Smith’s excellent book, Other minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life and Chris Packham’s BBC series on Animal Einstein’s had just finished airing, something that perhaps helped channel my thoughts and highlighted the difficulty of assessing intelligence even in human species let alone between those of different genera, families, or classes.

Alongside raw problem solving these is a question of culture and continual mental block humans place on research, always placing ourselves at the top of the tree or at the centre of any level of supremacy. We are the benchmark upon which all else is measured but given the breadth of life is this true? We count ourselves at the pinnacle and yet our species is very new and short lived one in geological speaking. Bacteria have been surviving relatively unchanged for hundreds of millennia, they are more diverse than mammals and able to survive over a broader range of environments. It is our own perceptions that can blinker is to what the sparrow is thinking. Are the sparrows through processes nothing more than a sequence of NOT, AND, and OR gates and if so, are our own thought processes any different all be it more complex and confounded by self-identity and self-absorption.

One only needs to lock eyes with an animal to experience a kinship, some level of understanding, something that changes as we move through the species. I have never ‘had a moment’ when staring into a Bees eyes. A mammal’s core experiences are not that dissimilar to ours after all once you distil it down. Birds however are a step removed, their 3D awareness from flight and different perceptual mechanisms perhaps removes them more from our frame of reference. After all, when caring for injured birds I have had such moments of connections although this could just have been projection on my part.

At the end of the day, we cannot be sure what our nearest and dearest are thinking so why expect to be able to do so for another taxon. Is this pursuit of understanding futile? Maybe, but it is a fascinating journey, nevertheless.