Around the Yard and Around the Web

Crows are geeks.

And if you have any doubt, let me offer some evidence.  This crow is clearly an "early adopter".  I photographed him this weekend helping himself to cherries in the cherry tree. 

Even though the cherries are very ripe, most of the birds haven't quite gotten around to feasting on them yet.  (Although, Saturday night, coming home from a monthly poker game, my roommate and I surprised a raccoon in the tree.  He -- actual gender unknown -- was pretty small, so I'm guessing he was one of this year's crop.  I got to see his masked face for just a second before he vanished into the shadows. )  The crow however is on top of things, and getting first jump on the cherries.

 

 

It continues to be an exciting year for fledglings and juveniles.  At least one group of House Sparrow young'uns is coming of age around my yard.  I now have photos of them at several stages of development.  I suspect that there is more than one group though, because I took some photographs of slightly older fledglings a week or so before I caught shots of younger ones. (You can see those photos here and here.)  

Saturday morning there was a juvenile House Sparrow raising quite a ruckus in the front yard.  It went on for almost ten minutes with him flitting from bush to bush.  I never did figure out what he was so agitated about, and eventually he quieted down and went back to his normal routine.  But I did get some good shots while he was pontificating.

Timmy's Friend

Timmy!

I also managed to get some good shots of my resident Pigeon Timmy, along with his frequent companion.  Timmy is the larger pigeon with the lighter colored wings.  I have also noticed a new pigeon in the neighborhood -- a thin, mostly white pigeon that I haven't seen until recently.  I'll keep an eye on this new arrival and see if I can get some photos.

The great challenge of the season, for me, remains the House Finch fledglings.  The couple has been here almost all year, and I was pretty sure they were nesting nearby, but so far I have no definitive proof of juvenile finches.  I saw some birds recently on the rail that could have been the elusive youngsters, but I didn't get a good enough look, and couldn't get any photos.  Like Captain Ahab, though, I will continue to pursue them.

Updates, Follow-ups and interesting links

I was very happy to be included in the most recent Carnival of Evolution.  If you haven't seen it (or don't know what a blog carnival is -- I didn't until recently) it is basically a regular round up of  blog writing on a certain topic -- in this case evolution, which is broad enough to include many things.  My recent post Game Show Pigeons and Ball Playing Dogs was included and I've been gratified to see a nice up-tick in viewings as a result.  If you're interested in biology, evolution, science writing or any number of related topics I suggest you check it out.  It comes out monthly and is hosted on a different blog each time.  This edition was hosted on Lawrence E. Moran's blog Sandwalk -- which is, itself, well worth checking out.  (There's even a musical interlude called "Cambrian Explosion" that you really have to see.)

There are blog carnivals, by the way, on all kinds of topics.  If you're curious, you can check out Blog Carnival to get an idea of what's out there.

One of the people who found my posting from the carnival was Roslyn Dakin, a PhD student from Kingston, Ontario.  Turns out, she also has an interest in the Monty Hall problem.  Her take is somewhat different than mine and well worth checking out.  In fact, her whole blog is very rewarding.  You can check out her Monty Hall article here, and her most recent posts here.

And, finally, there's a great article in the Grand Forks Herald recently, by Herald editor/publisher Mike Jacobs.  "Target Species Enrich Birding Experience", about the joys and expenses of having a birding wish list.  (I have a wish list -- both local and more farfetched -- which I'll be sharing in the near future.)  

If you like Birdland West, you might also want to check out our sister blog Books and Beasts, which focuses on reviews of books about animals and related topics.

(Many of the original photographs featured on Birdland West are available for sale as art quality prints.  You can check out all of our offerings at http://AlexWashoe.imagekind.com.  If you see an image here that does not show up on our Imagekind site please contact me directly and I'll let you know about availability.)

Game Show Pigeons and Ball Playing Dogs

You have to bear with me for a second, but this will get around to birds, I promise.

Timmy, my resident "special needs" pigeon.

Over at Sciencewriter.org (possibly the coolest domain name ever), Davide Castelvecchi, who is a physical sciences and mathematics editor at Scientific American, has been stirring up controversy recently by revisiting what's known as "The Monty Hall Problem".  If you're not familiar with it -- where have you been?  It's been discussed over the years everywhere from hard science magazines to Car Talk.  It's derived from the problem that Monty Hall often presented to contestants on Let's Make A Deal.  You have three curtains.  Behind one of them is a car, and behind each of the other two is a worthless gag gift (like a donkey).  (I know, I know -- who says a donkey is worthless?  But that's not the point of the problem).  You have to pick one of the curtains.  Let's say you choose number One.  After you make your choice, Monty reveals what's behind one of the other curtains, and the one he reveals is always a donkey.  Let's say Monty opens number Two. Then, he offers you a choice.  Do you want to keep the curtain you chose, or do you want to trade?

Monty's problem (not my photo, obviously).

For most of us, our intuitive guess is that it doesn't matter.  We had a one in three chance of picking right the first time and that hasn't changed.  Or, conversely, since there are now two unopened curtains, we have a fifty-fifty chance.  Either way, switching can't increase our odds.

It turns out though, that isn't true. Statistically you are always better off switching.  In fact it almost doubles your chances. I'm not good with this sort of math so I'll just refer you over to those who are -- and if you want to argue about it (as a lot of people do, judging by the comments section) you can argue with them.  Proving the solution isn't really my point here. (Check it out here.)

The reason this came up again at Scientific American, though, is because of an article they published back in January of this year.  John Allen Paulos, a mathematician at Temple University, noted that pigeons didn't seem to have the same difficulty with the Monty Hall Problem that humans do.  On the contrary, pigeons (being good empiricists, as Paulos says) learn the best strategy after only a few tries.  (You can see the article here.)

A few years ago another scientist -- Tim Pennings, a Professor at Hope College in Michigan -- was playing fetch with his dog, throwing a tennis ball into the water for the dog to retrieve.  The dog, Elvis, would run along the shore and at some point plunge into the water toward the ball.  What Pennings found was that, in most cases, Elvis was choosing a path that closely approximated the optimal path (the path with the shortest travel time) to the ball.  The path can be worked out using fairly complicated calculus equation -- but Elvis seemed to be doing it "in his head" and "on the fly". (Again, I'm not going to try to explain the math -- you can look into it more here if you're interested.)

Precision landings almost every time.

These kind of remarkable abilities are everywhere in nature.  The small songbirds in my yard routinely land on the thin perches of a bird feeder that is swaying in the wind -- and they do so coming from across the yard, setting their trajectory as they approach. Only a couple of times have I ever seen a bird have to pull up and come at it again.  Squirrels leap from the rail of my deck to the cherry tree nearby, and catch the thin branches, which again are often swaying in the wind.  Birds also fly through the cherry tree despite its dense branches and (at this time of year) leaves.  They can fly straight through and out the other side.  Imagine trying to write a computer program to pilot something the size of a chickadee through such a complex space, complicated more by ever changing light conditions, wind turbulence, and so on.  The amount of calculation that it requires is staggering.

The catch looks easy, but try writing a program to do it.

But let's not leave humans out.  Ichiro Suzuki does the same thing nearly every day.  When an outfielder hears the crack of the ball leaving the bat and starts to run, he has time for almost no conscious thought about where it's going or how to get there.  Again, it's a complex mathematical problem solved on the fly -- timing his leap to catch the ball just before it goes over the wall.  And I've seen dogs playing with Frisbees or tennis balls who were as good as any major leaguer.

The greatest ball player I've ever known.

Paulos warns against the mistake of thinking that these abilities reflect some kind of conscious knowledge on the part of animals.  Of course, they don't.  They represent the problem solving ability wired into brains over billions of years of evolution.  (And in the case of dogs -- and to some degree pigeons -- of tens of thousands of years of intense breeding).  Corgis, for instance, are herding dogs, whose job was to keep livestock moving in one direction.  The ability to foresee the movements of a sheep and set your own course to intercept it effectively is not all that different from what Elvis was demonstrating on the beach.  

If you want to drive the unconscious nature of these faculties home, I invite you to walk into a room sometime and ask if anyone there is good at calculus.  When almost everyone predictably says no, toss a tennis ball to one of them.  Almost certainly, they will catch it, and when they do you can show them (with the help of a mathematician friend, if you're like me) the equation that describes what they just did.  We're all better at math than we think.

The furor over the Monty Hall problem does show, however, that for us humans our conscious thinking sometimes gets in the way.  I learned this a long time ago in art school.  One of the reasons why it's so hard for many people to learn to draw is because what we "know" about objects (say the size and form of a table) gets in the way of what we actually see before us.  Most people asked to draw a table will draw an abstract representation of a table instead of the object they see before them, which is skewed by perspective and point of view and really looks nothing like our idealized notion of "table".

 Oh, and I wanted to get back to pigeons.  More on that very soon.

If you like Birdland West, you might also want to check out our sister blog Books and Beasts, which focuses on reviews of books about animals and related topics.

(Many of the original photographs featured on Birdland West are available for sale as art quality prints.  You can check out all of our offerings at http://AlexWashoe.imagekind.com.  If you see an image here that does not show up on our Imagekind site please contact me directly and I'll let you know about availability.)