As a child, he was called "the bird boy" at school. Shortly after getting his driver's license, he found a dead deer on the road and took it home to his parents' house in the forests of Oregon to see how vultures would eat it. Noah Strycker has spent weeks in Antarctica, crossed leech-infested forests in India, stayed awake for almost four days straight during the Norwegian solstice, and visited 40 countries just to break the world record of encountering 6,042 bird species in a single year, half of those existing on Earth.
The more birds he found, the more the American writer, photographer, and ornithologist knew about birds, but above all, he learned more about himself. In That thing with feathers. The surprising life of birds and what they reveal about human beings, recently published by Capitán Swing, Strycker flies over "a very recent change in scientific thinking, which encourages focusing less on the singularity of humans and more on what the human animal shares with other animals." "Human characteristics such as dancing to music, self-awareness, creating works of art, or love are also recognized in birds, and it is not anthropomorphism; and anyone who suggests otherwise is because they ignore what it means to be a bird," he explains.
Strycker recounts that catching a penguin "is very easy: just approach it and lift it off the ground." The explorer Apsley Cherry-Garrard, after his visit to Cape Crozier in 1911, wrote: "They are extraordinarily like children. They are so curious in their little bodies that there is hardly any room left for fear."
Strycker explains that "fear is a feeling shaped by danger," so it is not surprising that birds living in remote regions generally allow one to approach them because they never learned to fear us.
As the world warms, penguins are moving south, and humans are moving towards a more accessible Antarctica, so they may end up discovering our true nature and start to fear it. "That would take a long time. We would probably kill them all before they make that connection," predicts the American ornithologist.
Snowball is a cockatoo living in South Carolina who became famous on the internet for dancing to the Backstreet Boys' Everybody. The bird appeared as a curiosity on BBC, CNN, or David Letterman's show, but the scientific question was what a cockatoo is doing coordinating its movements to the rhythm of an external musical source, a feature that was previously considered exclusively human.
Wild bird dances are usually related to courtship, but that does not fit the strictest definition of dancing. "Snowball crosses the line, which could give us valuable information about one of the most controversial topics in human history: the origin of music," explains Strycker.
Even Darwin faced difficulties on the matter. "The enjoyment of music and the ability to produce musical notes are faculties that have no utility for man," he wrote in The Descent of Man in 1871. However, he noted that it is present "in all races, including the wildest." Psychologist Steven Pinker agrees that music has no utility for humans; without it, we would still be able to find food, shelter, a partner, and other basic life matters. Other animals do not write operas or download music from iTunes and manage just fine. Pinker refers to music as an "auditory cheesecake" whose purpose is to stimulate "the pleasure circuits in the brain," like many unnecessary fats and oils.
"Snowball demonstrates that birds can not only enjoy music but also move their heads, feet, and dance to different rhythms, which is quite unusual," concludes Strycker.
The most powerful hard drive in the animal kingdom weighs barely 190 grams of memory, developed thanks to a life or death scenario. The need to store a large number of pine seeds to survive during winter forces nutcrackers to become living hard drives, memorizing up to 5,000 hiding spots in the ground to store thousands of pine nuts, sometimes several kilometers away. They do not mark the sites. They do not leave marks. In fact, they are covered under the snow. They do not search randomly. They cannot smell the seeds, nor do they find others' by chance. "It's a mental feat. Their memory is probably the number one in the animal kingdom in terms of information bits," points out Strycker.
Territorial birds, when they see their reflection in windows, car mirrors, and other reflective surfaces, instinctively try to drive away the "other bird." And they can repeat this behavior in the same place for months or even years without realizing their mistake, eventually leading them to death.
In 2008, a group of German researchers announced that magpies were able to recognize themselves in a mirror. Until then, only humans, great apes, orcas, dolphins, and elephants were known to do so. All large mammals with big brains. To find out, they painted a colored spot under the beak that they could only see through the mirror's reflection. If they scratched the spot, they would understand that it was not another bird.
"When you recognize your image, it means you understand that you are a unique individual different from others, and that goes hand in hand with human development. When babies learn to recognize themselves in the mirror, they begin to show emotions like sympathy, empathy, and pain. Lying and deceiving depend on realizing that you are a different individual from others. Magpies steal from each other and try to hide it. They have something that sets them apart from most birds in the world," points out Strycker.
But they go even further in that recognition; one of the most enigmatic behaviors of magpies is their habit of holding funerals. Strycker recounts that when a magpie comes across a dead companion, it starts squawking loudly to summon its companions, who join in a loud chorus of squawks around the corpse. At a certain point, they all fall silent and enter a period of contemplation, during which some gently preen the dead bird's plumage, and shortly after, they silently withdraw one by one.
Just as workaholics exist, the bowerbird could be considered an artaholic for dedicating its entire life to art. Some of the first explorers who encountered their nests thought they were small huts created by natives.
It all started because female bowerbirds began to prefer males who collected flashy objects and worked on their pergola-shaped nests. This data was passed on to their genes, and now males have ended up creating works of art in the middle of the forest. "But we can appreciate artistic endeavors without having to relate them to any kind of seduction," the ornithologist points out.
So, is that art? In 2012, evolutionary biologist John Endler established the biological definition of visual art as "the creation of a visual pattern by an individual with the purpose of influencing the behavior of others." Although Strycker believes that art, as a form of communication, "can convey any type of message, apart from seduction and status." "It is a fact that bowerbirds do not paint Renaissance masterpieces, but we have no idea what bowerbirds may achieve in a million years," points out Strycker.
Whether diligent artists or seductive craftsmen, the only certainty is that male bowerbirds are confirmed bachelors absorbed in their work. They leave no room for anything else in their lives. Other animals build structures and even embellish them, like spiders that decorate their webs with additional silk, but these remain the only ones, "besides humans, who create objects solely to attract an audience." This leads Strycker to conclude that "if a well-designed bower resembles a Picasso painting more than a piece of furniture, then the bird is not just a carpenter: it is Picasso himself."
Strycker says that "if he were to be born again, he would choose to be an albatross. There is something spiritual about them." Spending 95% of their lives in the open sea, they live very differently from us. Laysan albatrosses, nesting on tropical Pacific islands, fly about 3,200 kilometers on round trips to Alaska just to bring a quick snack to their hungry chicks.
These birds are capable of covering several hundred kilometers in a day, at night or in the midst of storms, using their 3.5-meter wingspan. They take short naps in the air. There is evidence that they can deactivate half of their brain to sleep while traveling at 65 kilometers per hour. One might assume that they have had to sacrifice their love lives, but it turns out they are incredibly faithful and may hold, in Strycker's eyes, "the most passionate love relationships of all living beings on the planet."
Unlike us, their divorce rate is around 0%. Patience is everything in an albatross's life. After hatching, it remains alone in the nest for nine months, most of the time in quiet contemplation of its surroundings, as it has no siblings to talk to. It grows slowly, and its parents are absent for long periods, working diligently scouring the remote seas for food, only returning for a quick delivery. The day it is ready to leave the nest, it stretches its untested wings and ventures into the sea without any guidance, spending the next six years without even approaching land.
Afterward, it returns to its native island with the sole purpose of finding a mate. Other adolescent albatrosses do the same, and they join with someone with whom they will remain faithful until one of them dies, which may take another 50 years.
The secret to their marital success? They don't see each other. They nest at most once a year, then return to the sea. No one knows how or when they decide to reunite after a year. Sometimes, two. Every time they reunite, they make the most of the scarce time they spend together in the nest. They sleep with their heads nestled on each other's chests, grooming each other's fine head plumage. "Most people go through their entire lives without seeing a single albatross," says Strycker, "but if love has evolved in the same way as any physical trait, then there is no reason for it to be exclusively a human characteristic."
"This doesn't seem very romantic, does it?" Strycker wonders, "but let's look at it more closely. They manage to maintain relationships for decades with endless seas between them. They don't have cell phones to stay in touch, spend months of their solitary lives over the seas without knowing if their partner is still alive, and with the only hope of being able to reunite once more on some desolate island when the time comes. There aren't many humans capable of such a thing."