Quotes from Jennifer Ackerman

AS A HUMAN BEING," Einstein once wrote, "one has been endowed with just enough intelligence to be able to see clearly how utterly inadequate that intelligence is when confronted with what exists.

Being in nature refreshes us by ... allowing us to surrender to involuntary attention: the effortless and often enjoyable noticing of sensory stimuli in our environment.

Each spring the robins nesting in our cherry tree attack the side mirror of our car as if it were a rival, pecking furiously at their own reflections while streaking the door with guano. But who among us hasn't been toppled by our vanity or made an enemy of our own image?

If one of the species you're using in your experiment fails every test you give it, the problem may be you, the researcher, not the animal. You may have failed to understand what is relevant to the way a bird sees the world.

Tempting as it may be to interpret the behavior of other animals in terms of human mental processes, it's perhaps even more tempting to reject the possibility of kinship. It's what primatologist Frans de Waal calls "anthropodenial," blindness to humankind characteristics of other species,"Those who are in anthropodenial," says de Waal, "try to build a brick wall to separate humans from the rest of the animal kingdom.

Birds are facing change on a scale unknown in their evolutionary history. This is a result of the Anthropocene—the new epoch of man-made change that is contributing to what has been called the sixth mass extinction.

I love this idea, that nature dreamed up the same kind of sleep in both humans and birds, fostering the growth of big brains in creatures so far apart on life's tree.

A narrow-minded man can lead one to devalue others, and in the end, to desperately dangerous hates of outsiders, ranging in expression from discrimination against minorities to world conflagrations,' Tolman wrote. The solution? Create broader cognitive maps in the mind that encompass bigger geographical boundaries and a wider social scope, embracing those we might consider others, and in this way encourage empathy and understanding.

In scoping out the party crowd, does one face catch your eye? The Tierra del Fuegans have an expression, mamihlapinatapei, which is listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the world's mist succinct word. It refers to the act of 'looking into each other's eyes, each hoping that the other will initiate what both want to do but neither chooses to commence.

I can't imagine pressing on relentlessly through day and night with mind, body, spirit in a single state, can't imagine denying myself the possibility of a fresh start.

He taught me the difference between casual "birdwatching" and the more intense, focused "birding," and urged me to go beyond identifying birds to noting their actions and behavior.

What kind of intelligence allows a bird to anticipate the arrival of a distant storm? Or find its way to a place it has never been before, though it may be thousands of miles away? Or precisely imitate the complex songs of hundreds of other species? Or hide tens of thousands of seeds over hundreds of square miles and remember where it put them six months later? (I would flunk these sorts of intelligence tests as readily as birds might fail mine.)

If a bird's hair cells are damaged by disease or loud noises—say, by the blasting decibels of a rock concert in a domed stadium—they can regenerate. Ours can't.)

In the 1990s, reports began to roll in from New Caledonia, a small island in the South Pacific, of crows that fashion their own tools in the wild and appear to transmit local styles of toolmaking from one generation to the next—a feat reminiscent of human culture and proof that sophisticated tool skills do not require a primate brain.

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

Tiny fairywren Who is your father? *snake chomp* Guess we'll never know

In some cities, you can find smoked cigarette butts in sparrow nests, which effectively function as a parasite repellent. Butts from smoked cigarettes retain large amounts of nicotine and other toxic substances, including traces of pesticides that repel all kinds of harmful creepy crawlies—an apparently ingenious new use of materials.

A frigate bird with a seven-foot wingspan has a skeleton that weighs less than its feathers.

It's a natural human impulse

Surprising," says Lefebvre, "but reassuring in a way: At least we found one test that grassquits do well. If one of the species you're using in your experiment fails every test you give it, the problem may be you, the researcher, not the animal. You may have failed to understand what is relevant to the way a bird sees the world.

We dig up dinosaurs to try and figure out what happened to them. Perhaps someday dinosaurs, in the form of corvids, will dig us up to figure out what happened to us.

I discovered in nature the same appeal I found in books. Both were engrossing, filled with the richness of particularities and yet mysteriously universal. Both were the stuff of perspective.

It seemed to Whish that any potential crack was worth trying to open," wrote the scientists. "Even a person's face was not sacrosanct. He would fly to the face and clutch hole on the nose arch. He would then hang upside down and peer into the nostrils.

Instead, each bird is interacting with up to seven close neighbors, making individual movement decisions based on maintaining velocity and distance from fellow flock members and copying how sharply a neighbor turns, so that a group of, say, four hundred birds can veer in another direction in a little over half a second. What emerges is almost instantaneous ripples of movement in what appears to be one living curtain of bird.