1.
With less human noise to compete with, the birds are able to have ‘deeper conversations,’ says biologist (2020):
Researchers studying birdsong in the San Francisco Bay found the sparrows’ mating calls became quieter, more complex, and just generally “sexier” now that they don’t have to compete with the sounds of cars and cellphones, says study co-author Elizabeth Derryberry.
A side-effect of the pandemic:
Without cars, mating calls travel twice the distance, and also more information can be transmitted.
Does this analogy work? It’s the one they give: As the party winds down and people go home, you get quieter again, right? You don’t keep yelling, and you maybe have your sort of deeper conversations at that point.
I would love to see a follow-up study? For a brief period, long-form discursive song was favoured. So was there a generation of famous sparrow rhetoricians, like the orators of Ancient Greece? Do they look back on the early 2020s as the golden age of sparrow Homer?
PREVIOUSLY:
Just pandemic things (2023).
2.
Parrots taught to video call each other become less lonely, finds research (The Guardian, 2023): In total the birds made 147 deliberate calls to each other during the study.
Some would sing, some would play around and go upside down, others would want to show another bird their toys.
More at the FT: Scientists pioneer ‘animal internet’ with dog phones and touchscreens for parrots (paywall-busting link).
26 birds involved … would use the system up to three hours a day, with each call lasting up to five minutes.
Why? Because pet parrots:
typically live alone in their owners’ homes though their counterparts in the wild typically socialise within large flocks.
Flocks.
You know, although the 1:1 parrot-phone is interesting, I wonder whether a zoom conference call would be more appropriate? Or, better, an always-on smart speaker that is a window to a virtual forest, collapsing geography.
Another project, mentioned in that same article:
Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas, who heads the university’s Animal-Computer Interaction Group, started by developing a DogPhone that enables animals to contact their owners when they are left alone.
Ref.
Birds of a Feather Video-Flock Together: Design and Evaluation of an Agency-Based Parrot-to-Parrot Video-Calling System for Interspecies Ethical Enrichment, CHI ‘23: Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
3.
Empty cities, virtual forests… this bird sings across time.
Lubman first became intrigued by reports of a curious echo from the Mayan pyramid of Kukulkan at Chichen Itza, in Mexico’s Yucatan region. The odd “chirped” echo resounds from the pyramid’s staircases in response to hand claps of people standing near its base. To hear for himself, Lubman packed up his recording gear and traveled to Chichen Itza last January.
After studying the staircases and analyzing his recordings and sonograms of the echoes, Lubman came back convinced that this was no architectural freak. In his paper, Lubman argued that the design of the staircases was deliberate and that the echo is an ancient recording, coded in stone, of the call of the Maya’s sacred bird, the quetzal.
omg too sublime, I am a sucker for avian archaeoacoustics
PREVIOUSLY:
Microdosing cathedrals and the synthetic acoustic environment of the ancient world (2022).
4.
You will NEVER GUESS what I found out about CATNIP this week.
You know when cats go crazy about catnip and start rubbing their faces all over it?
Yeah well catnip is a mosquito repellent. So it’s evolutionary behaviour to avoid mosquito-borne parasites.
Catnip, Nepeta cataria, contains nepetalactol:
Rubbing behavior transfers nepetalactol onto the faces and heads of respondents where it repels the mosquito, Aedes albopictus. Thus, self-anointing behavior helps to protect cats against mosquito bites.
Not quite the same but:
Tonic water contains quinine which is used to treat malaria and gin & tonic was invented by the East India Company to keep its colonising army safe in India.
Bet the covid vaccine would have been more popular if it also got you drunk. A lesson for next time around.
Ref.
Uenoyama, R., Miyazaki, T., Hurst, J. L., Beynon, R. J., Adachi, M., Murooka, T., Onoda, I., Miyazawa, Y., Katayama, R., Yamashita, T., Kaneko, S., Nishikawa, T., & Miyazaki, M. (2021). The characteristic response of domestic cats to plant iridoids allows them to gain chemical defense against mosquitoes. Science advances, 7(4), eabd9135.
1.
With less human noise to compete with, the birds are able to have ‘deeper conversations,’ says biologist (2020):
A side-effect of the pandemic:
Without cars, mating calls travel twice the distance, and also more information can be transmitted.
Does this analogy work? It’s the one they give:
I would love to see a follow-up study? For a brief period, long-form discursive song was favoured. So was there a generation of famous sparrow rhetoricians, like the orators of Ancient Greece? Do they look back on the early 2020s as the golden age of sparrow Homer?
PREVIOUSLY:
Just pandemic things (2023).
2.
Parrots taught to video call each other become less lonely, finds research (The Guardian, 2023):
More at the FT: Scientists pioneer ‘animal internet’ with dog phones and touchscreens for parrots (paywall-busting link).
Why? Because pet parrots:
Flocks.
You know, although the 1:1 parrot-phone is interesting, I wonder whether a zoom conference call would be more appropriate? Or, better, an always-on smart speaker that is a window to a virtual forest, collapsing geography.
Another project, mentioned in that same article:
Ref.
Birds of a Feather Video-Flock Together: Design and Evaluation of an Agency-Based Parrot-to-Parrot Video-Calling System for Interspecies Ethical Enrichment, CHI ‘23: Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
3.
Empty cities, virtual forests… this bird sings across time.
omg too sublime, I am a sucker for avian archaeoacoustics
PREVIOUSLY:
Microdosing cathedrals and the synthetic acoustic environment of the ancient world (2022).
4.
You will NEVER GUESS what I found out about CATNIP this week.
You know when cats go crazy about catnip and start rubbing their faces all over it?
Yeah well catnip is a mosquito repellent. So it’s evolutionary behaviour to avoid mosquito-borne parasites.
Catnip, Nepeta cataria, contains nepetalactol:
Not quite the same but:
Tonic water contains quinine which is used to treat malaria and gin & tonic was invented by the East India Company to keep its colonising army safe in India.
Bet the covid vaccine would have been more popular if it also got you drunk. A lesson for next time around.
Ref.
Uenoyama, R., Miyazaki, T., Hurst, J. L., Beynon, R. J., Adachi, M., Murooka, T., Onoda, I., Miyazawa, Y., Katayama, R., Yamashita, T., Kaneko, S., Nishikawa, T., & Miyazaki, M. (2021). The characteristic response of domestic cats to plant iridoids allows them to gain chemical defense against mosquitoes. Science advances, 7(4), eabd9135.