Bird Minds: Cognition and Behaviour of Australian Native Birds Paperback – November 6, 2015

Even if it is remotely possible that the author was playing favorites with her Australian birds, there is no denying that the stories she tells are amazing. For the brief time I was in Australia, I noticed that the birds behave very differently from those I know in the Americas. I enjoyed the book from cover to cover and want to go back to watch those Amazing Australian birds.

How long does it take for birds to go from being a nice enough feature of the world we find ourselves in to being interesting for their behaviour? My own journey has been over 20 years and is still accelerating, hints of which are in my Vimeo collection: vimeo.com/channels/593799 Gisela Kaplan's journey has been 15 years and with academic rigour applied to "many breathtaking discoveries that have changed forever the landscape of our knowledge about animal cognition".Bird Minds builds an argument across Chapters 3-11 identifying behaviours which challenge the old paradigm that followed Descartes and Skinner of assumed human uniqueness, but is careful not to call out that old paradigm for the nonsense it has clearly become. At most Kaplan hints at where the evidence is taking us through willingness to put 'intelligence' in scare quotes. Only in an epilogue that follows broad assessments of target orders in the final chapter, is there a hint that there is a lot more to the story beyond this necessarily constrained setting out of recent revelations as they apply to the author's focus domain of Australian native birds.The opening chapter sets the background of recent identification that birds have reradiated from East Gondwana since the Cretaceous-Tertiary mass extinction, making Australia/Sahul the home of birds and base of bird diversification. The second chapter sets out the old paradigm presumptions which the subsequent evidence lays asunder, especially neurological quantifications embodying anthropocentric prejudices.I came to Bird Minds following Carl Safina's 2015  Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel  which makes parallel claims for selected non-primate mammalian orders: elephants, wolves and Ornicus; and that from Robert G B Reid's 2007  Biological Emergences: Evolution by Natural Experiment (Vienna Series in Theoretical Biology)  which sets out an alternate theoretical framing for animal evolution in which behavioural exploration precedes niche adaptation. Taken to its logical conclusion this would situate the origin of the general repertoire of bilateral animal behaviour back in the ninety million years between the collapse of  Snowball Earth  and the bilateral animal fossils of the Ediacaran. As Reid explains, there have been a few clear saltations since such as air breathing which opened new frontiers, but the essential complex behaviours needed to underpin feeding, breeding, recognition of kind and spatial mapping to allow movement, and more must have all been in place all along, alongside our shared developmental physiology that maintains integrity.While my own attention has been as much on water/shore birds as the parrots, corvids and songbirds which are the primary focus of Bird Minds, I finished reading and am writing this review having returned to this place evacuated Christmas Day while in sight of the Wye River fire where Kaplan's observations of magpies and kookaburras ring true loudly every day. Our ever loyal magpie couple, one living life to the full despite a long bad foot, clearly ran out of patience with one of the young squawking kookaburras and chased it out of camp, while the patient kookaburra parent keeps trying to teach them not just how to make a living but how to deliver the famous kookaburra laugh. Meanwhile the magpie songs enrich our visitor experience, as do many other avian species.Read Bird Minds so you have a lot more in mind when you see birds in the wild, be it in the bush or grassland, by stream or lake, at the beach or even in suburbia which many are recolonising. The most interesting behaviours are usually too quick to pull a camera out, so just watch and see that birds really do have minds of their own which are as competent at guiding their complex lives as ours are at surviving the industrially sterilised world of our own making.Science gets things right when it remains open to evidence. There never was a scientific basis for the presumption of human uniqueness. It was cultural prejudice writ large and not shared by even indigenous cultures. What is indisputably unique is in the collective via the division of labour on a scale only preceded by eusocial insects. We are organised animals with access to an explosive growth of knowledge, some of which is now undermining our anthropocentric comfort zone. That singing magpie and Bird Minds remind us that "bird brain" may be the most misplaced insult ever conceived.

This is an outstanding read--for the right readers. It is rather heavy on science, quite up to date, although accessible to readers with some science backgrounds. It's obviously centered on Australian birds (and therefore mostly on Australian research, which appears vigorous). There is something of an axe to grind, as well; Kaplan sees many general conclusions about bird behaviors (such as cooperative behaviors and lifetime pair bonding) as based on what she calls high-latitude species (that is, European and American studies). That's assuming general patterns from studies that are somewhat limited in geographic scope. Many Australian species exhibit cooperative behavior, long-lasting pair bonding, and long lifespans (one cockatoo may live to 110). Kaplan also looks closely at tool use in birds, and notes that most research has been with crows.Readers who wish to cut to the essential information quickly could look at the tables. A long table in Appendix 1 lists hundreds of birds by several categories, including tool use--dozens of species use different tools in a variety of ways. This is discussed at length. Aside from the male palm cockatoo using sticks for drumming, there's an apparently credible report of black kites picking up smoldering fire sticks and dropping them to light fires and waiting for prey to be flushed out.Kaplan considers how Australia's geologic history has shaped Australian birds, including arid conditions, sporadic availability of food and isolation from other land masses. Many of the birds have wonderful names: the striated pardalote, grey-crowned babbler, spangled drongo, rufous whistler, willie wagtail.There's also some wonderful odd behavior. Banteng (from Southeast Asia, a population flourishing in Australia) approached by a Torresian crow rolling over with four feet in the air, so the bird can pick off ticks. And a bird apparently luring prey by calling, a sort of siren song.

Methodical, uncompromising, the best of great science, humility and selfless service on behalf of the most important of all terrestrial vertebrates - avifauna.

Great snot in the eye to all those ivory tower non-experimentalists who decry every time Homo superior is actually shown to be Homo ordinarius. Professor Kaplan demonstrates all through this book a keen eye for observation, the scientific attitude that explanations may be in error when new data is uncovered, and ties the progress of study of bird minds tightly to observational evidence. She points out where more research is needed to keep these brilliant animals thriving. Wonderful work. Tawny frogmouths next...

Wonderful introduction to bird thoughts Marjorie Hope Bundy

I bought this for a friend after hearing a fascinating radio interview with the author. I haven't read it though and I'm not sure yet how my friend found it.

brilliant