Quotes from Jennifer Ackerman

this whiff of tissue harbors our mental maps—and our memories. In fact, our recollections appear to be all bound up with where we experienced an event.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

It's a telling example of how basic owl science has boosted human medicine—and how an owl's eyes and ears work together.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We think of owls as short legged because they tuck in their legs at rest and in flight. But most have long, well-muscled legs, up to half the length of their bodies, with strong bones, especially in their feet.

An owl's auditory system shares with other birds another superpower we mammals don't possess: it doesn't age.

José Luis Peña, a neuroscientist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and his collaborators have discovered that the sound localization system in a barn owl's brain performs sophisticated mathematical computations to execute this pinpointing of prey.