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How do birds know what to do?

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    How do birds know what to do?

    Latest development in the Rogin garden (for those lucky enough to hear about the hedgehog on the thon) is a wood pigeon who has been building a nest in a tree out the back. Now, it clearly hasn't been on bird zoopla to realise my cats will be out and about. I'll do my best to help it.

    But my main question is how the hell do they know how to do it? A wood pigeon's brain must be about the size of a pea. How are they able, with no experience, training or guidance, able to source and select the materials necessary for a nest, and then carry out the intricate construction of one, when I would struggle to make a rudimentary fort out of the cushions from my sofa and a sheet?

    #2
    Survival

    They are rubbish at maths

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      #3
      https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/23/s...in%20primates.

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        #4
        Don't you watch Springwatch, apparently Chris Packham talks about this kind of stuff all the time.

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          #5
          I was at Uni where Chris Packham was from, when he had just got on the telly. He still used to hang about in the student pubs and chat up anyone who recognised him.

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            #6
            Should have fluttered your eyelashes and started playing with your hair. You might have learned something about nesting

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              #7
              Rogin On The Nest is one of the great lost TV shows.

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                #8
                Or of course Rogin's Nest.

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                  #9
                  Wood pigeons are noisy fuckers. Get a nesting pair in your garden and it sounds.like someone continually bashing away on a 1980s synth drum kit.

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                    #10
                    I can't stop giggling at this thread title.

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                      #11
                      Originally posted by ursus arctos View Post
                      Survival

                      They are rubbish at maths
                      Could a bird have built the pyramids? I don't think so.

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                        #12
                        Behavior wires into the brain across millions of generations. The pigeons who didn't build nests did not reproduce so their brains died out, like a white skinned tribe would have died out at the Equator due to UV exposure killing the folate in pregnant women.

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                          #13
                          Yesterday a baby blackbird came into our garage. We were going in and out to the garden and the door was permanently open.

                          No matter what we (or its mother, chirping outside the door with worms for it) did it wouldn’t leave, preferring to go further into the dark and it ended up sitting on a paint can on a high shelf.

                          It was still there an hour later and only after lunch and a long meeting did I find it had finally gone.

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                            #14
                            How do moles know what to do?

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                              #15
                              I always get annoyed when Nelly Furtado sings (like a bird) "Like a bird" ... I don't know where my home is.

                              It's one of the things birds definitely do know, sometimes from thousands of miles away.

                              (I did complain but Nelly has yet to reply, very rude).

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                                #16
                                Originally posted by Sporting View Post
                                How do moles know what to do?
                                Spy school

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                                  #17
                                  How do birds know what to do?
                                  Twitter, of course.

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                                    #18
                                    What about bees too, eh?

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                                      #19
                                      You know that thing where you're coming towards someone and the space is narrow, so you move to the right and they move to their left and there follows a kind of dance where each is trying to give the other room to pass by? This doesn't happen with birds, does it? Though maybe they usually move in the same direction, anyway.

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                                        #20
                                        Originally posted by Sporting View Post
                                        You know that thing where you're coming towards someone and the space is narrow, so you move to the right and they move to their left and there follows a kind of dance where each is trying to give the other room to pass by? This doesn't happen with birds, does it?
                                        To be fair, birds aren't usually walking in narrow corridors.

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                                          #21
                                          Migratory birds' navigational skills came up in a documentary which physicist Brian Cox presented a couple of years ago on quantum mechanics. Birds (or just some birds I expect) have a strong sense of the earth's magnetic field, which is one of the main tools they use to navigate. BC demonstrated that with some experiments using a bird in a closed cage which was rotated etc, and explained that the magnetic sense works by way of quantum mechanical phenomena at the sub-atomic level. The science was a bit over my head, and I was duly awed.

                                          The magnetic thing is also illustrated by the fact that birds go out of their way to avoid the Magnitogorsk region of the Ural mountains, where concentrations of strongly magnetised ores override the earth's magnetic field in their locality. Presumably birds who venture into that area get a very unpleasant sense of disorientation.
                                          Last edited by Evariste Euler Gauss; 09-06-2020, 10:19.

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                                            #22
                                            Originally posted by Sporting View Post
                                            You know that thing where you're coming towards someone and the space is narrow, so you move to the right and they move to their left and there follows a kind of dance where each is trying to give the other room to pass by? This doesn't happen with birds, does it? Though maybe they usually move in the same direction, anyway.
                                            It's even more incredible when you watch a murmuration of starlings. They all just seem to know when to change direction

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                                              #23
                                              I was thinking something similar the other day when witnessing a pair of magpies harassing a cat that had strayed too near for their liking, but ignoring a nearby dog. They are unlikely to have had any direct experience of the predatory nature of cats, yet something in the species memory clearly identified one type of hairy quadruped as dangerous and the other as harmless.

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                                                #24
                                                There's been some big developments in murmurationology in recent years.

                                                Also, this isn't about birds, but it's similar science.
                                                Last edited by Ginger Yellow; 09-06-2020, 10:43.

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                                                  #25

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