As many of you may know, John Kricher, well known to many of you in the extended Boston area, is a Professor Emeritus of Biology at Wheaton College in Norton, MA, where for 48 years he taught ecology, ornithology, and vertebrate evolution. He’s a Fellow of the American Ornithologists Union, and is past president of the Association of Field Ornithologists, the Wilson Ornithological Society, and the Nuttall Ornithological Club, where he has just gone back on as a board member. He has served on the board of the American Birding Association.

He recently shared a fascinating article from Current Biology Magazine, and the title of the article is the “Multi-level Society of a Small Brained Bird.”  The article is about the Vulturine guineafowls and they how they function in cohesive groupings and stable smaller groupings. So with that, we wanted to learn a little bit more about this research and then how it might correlate with smart birds like crows and their social interactions, and smaller groupings, particularly in overnight roosts.

Here are the highlights from John excerpted from our recent phone conversation:

  • we all have a variety of different kinds of multi-level associations.
  • it all comes down to one thing,
  • you have to be able to recognize individuals as distinct from one another,
  • and remember who they are, at least up to a point.
  • then you have to assign them status as to whether they’re extremely important to you, sort of important to you, or not important at all.
  • something we do routinely as humans, discovered in primates, and probably does exist in corvid societies as well.
  • key to social behaviors, Edward O. Wilson once wrote long time ago in 1975 in sociobiology.
    • social animals, the more social they are, the more they have to really recognize each other as individuals and remember that.
    • Because individuals interact, and in a negative way or a positive way,
    • you need to be able to remember that and essentially what it comes down to is respond in kind.
  • so, that’s a multi-level society.
  • a lot more complicated than what you might think from just looking at what you perceive.
  • as a random assemblage of everything from wildebeests to bison’s to flocks of birds.
  • it’s an amazing thing.
  • the Vulturine guineafowl study in Current Biology was unique
  • Vulturine guineafowl have tiny little heads relative to their body size.
  • they’re not birds you would take to be particularly cerebral.
  • being a Vulturine guineafowl, they belong to a group of birds that are pretty ancient evolutionarily.
  • they go back a long way, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re not smart.
  • this study was based on looking at roosts of about about 400 of them.
  • they get into big flocks during the day.
  • I’ve seen them with warthogs other kinds of African mammals.
  • they all roost together, about 400 of them get in a single roost.
  • now imagine doing that, imagine going to a hotel with 400 other people! We do it all the time.
  • the difference is, is that we don’t stay in the same room with them.
  • they all roost together.
  • in the morning, various groups up in that range in size from fairly small groups to fairly large groups reassemble.
  • if the group is small, in some of them it’s a dozen, 13, 14 different birds.
  • they all know each other, and off they go together.
  • some of these groups are as big as 50 or 60 birds, and they go off together.
  • but sometimes they don’t go off together, sometimes a small group will go off with a larger group.
  • at the same time, the small group knows each other and the large group knows each other.
  • this was discovered by tracking each bird with a GPS system.
  • not each bird of the 400, but a select subset of them.
  • it was learned that different groups of birds continually associate together.
  • as we say in science, non-random.
  • that was interesting, because these birds have small heads and one would presume small brains.
  • that’s where the study sort of left me a little bit.
  • I realized that chickens aren’t supposed to have really large brains, but they have a very elaborate peck order sometimes.
  • it’s not so much the size of brain as it is the density of neurons within the brain, and
  • that’s something that wasn’t really measured in this study.
  • the study is fascinating,
  • it suggests that these guineafowl, when you look at them, there’re several bunches of birds.
  • the birds know each other, at least to a degree as individuals, and
  • they associate together by choice, not by randomness.
  • that’s a big deal.
  • we know that crows are smart, as corvids.
  • the corvids, and ravens have been put through scientific analysis, intelligence tests, and
  • they rank really comparably to the great apes.
  • they don’t rank comparably to humans, but they certainly ranked comparably to the great apes.
  • fair to say that something like a raven or perhaps an American crow has about the intelligence level of a gorilla.
  • now that doesn’t mean it’s going to be expressed in the same way.
  • bird intelligence is fundamentally focused on bird survival, which is very much different from gorilla survival.
  • the ability to understand, to have cognition to learn, those kinds of characteristics.
  • it would shock me if they didn’t know one another as individuals.
  • they could have, because they need to have, a much higher level of sensitivity to individuality among them.
  • little nuances, whatever it is, that makes birds look different from one another and it’s committed to memory,
  • I think this is at very high level in the corvidae family.
  • I think there are groups of corvids who forage together during the day
  • then come together with other groups that they know, but they don’t necessarily hang out with them during the day.
  • for decades, ornithologists have believed that these large crow roosts have represented information centers.
  • they come together for other reasons.
  • they’re social animals.
  • the concept of coming together as an information center is based on,
    • if you’re a crow and you didn’t do very well foraging that day, maybe you can look at some other groups of crows
      • who look like they’re well-fed, happy, and
      • are having a good happy hour together, and
      • follow them out in the morning, and
      • see where they go,
      • and maybe you’ll find some food.
    • I fully believe that animals as intelligent as crows discern individuals in those large roosts.
  • it may be, that if you could possibly duplicate the Vulturine guineafowl study, you’d find that the same thing.
  • let’s say the same 30 crows go together to roost to every night.
  • they may be part of several thousand crows roosting in the trees.
  • but those 30 crows are all within proximity to one another in the same branches.
  • there’s a reason for that, and that’s because they benefit from their mutual proximity.
  • they benefit because they know each other, and
  • that enhances foraging and enhances survival.
  • I think the cues would be visual and auditory.
  • I think visual cues and certainly auditory cues work for the crows.
  • they do look at one another, and they look at one another hard.
  • they get familiar with one another that way, and I think through auditory perceptions as well.
  • we have not been able to crack through the difficulty of separating birds as individuals,
  • neither could Jane Goodall when she started studying chimpanzees.
  • she started looking at them and looking at them,
  • they were not the same, they were different, and
  • she could recognize each one as individuals.
  • over the years that I’ve been feeding birds sometimes,
  • when I’ve been really looking at them, I could recognize individuals.
  • sometimes that was because of strange characteristics of their plumage,
  • like a somewhat misplaced wing feather or something like that.
  • I think that birds do have the ability to recognizes each other as individuals very easily.
  • we apply social networking theory to a lot of different groups of birds like chickadees.
  • it’s like going into a club. You’re not all equal.
  • some are the dominant members of the club,
  • some call the shots,
  • some are working their way up through the ranks.
  • sometimes they work up their way through the ranks by meeting somebody who’s high ranking who takes them in.
  • I think that works in birds.
  • the thing to remember is a bird brain may be small, but so is your cell phone!
  • think of all the stuff that’s on your cell phone, all the stuff.
  • you couldn’t even begin to follow all of it.
  • that’s in something that you can stick on your fingernail.
  • what we’ve learned about the histology of bird brains is the density.
    • the density of neurons is very, very high.
    • that suggests that these things are streamlined
      • not only in their metabolism, and
      • their response to environment as they fly through complex environments like forests, but
      • they’re streamlined in terms of their ability if processing information.
      • and that just comes from neuron packing. That’s a bird!
  • I think when you’re in a roost and it’s dark and you hear,
    • “hey Marge, are you still there
    • I’m heading out to the field tomorrow,
    • a whole group is going out there.”
    • crows know how to speak crow.
    • I think their various notes,
    • the kinds of vocalizations they make could be extremely meaningful to one another
    • when they’re in the dark, and in the daytime, just looking at one another matters.
    • you can’t lose track of the fact that birds are keeping a lot of their behaviors secret from us.
    • we just don’t really know how they process these things.
  • I was watching a flock of snow buntings recently,
  • they were circling together as so many birds do, various species and flocks.
  • who decides whether to turn left or turn right or swing around or swoop down and
  • not quite land and move up again and swirl around again?
  • whose the one who’s in charge of that?
  • Is there one that’s in charge of that?
  • How do they do that?
  • yet they do it and it works very well for them.

As I said in my book, birds know more about their behavior than they are telling!