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?
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
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.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider sharing it by email or on social media. Here’s the link. Thanks, —Matt.
‘Yes, we’ll see them together some Saturday afternoon then,’ she said. ‘I won’t have any hand in your not going to Cathedral on Sunday morning. I suppose we must be getting back. What time was it when you looked at your watch just now?’ "In China and some other countries it is not considered necessary to give the girls any education; but in Japan it is not so. The girls are educated here, though not so much as the boys; and of late years they have established schools where they receive what we call the higher branches of instruction. Every year new schools for girls are opened; and a great many of the Japanese who formerly would not be seen in public with their wives have adopted the Western idea, and bring their wives into society. The marriage laws have been arranged so as to allow the different classes to marry among[Pg 258] each other, and the government is doing all it can to improve the condition of the women. They were better off before than the women of any other Eastern country; and if things go on as they are now going, they will be still better in a few years. The world moves. "Frank and Fred." She whispered something to herself in horrified dismay; but then she looked at me with her eyes very blue and said "You'll see him about it, won't you? You must help unravel this tangle, Richard; and if you do I'll--I'll dance at your wedding; yours and--somebody's we know!" Her eyes began forewith. Lawrence laughed silently. He seemed to be intensely amused about something. He took a flat brown paper parcel from his pocket. making a notable addition to American literature. I did truly. "Surely," said the minister, "surely." There might have been men who would have remembered that Mrs. Lawton was a tough woman, even for a mining town, and who would in the names of their own wives have refused to let her cross the threshold of their homes. But he saw that she was ill, and he did not so much as hesitate. "I feel awful sorry for you sir," said the Lieutenant, much moved. "And if I had it in my power you should go. But I have got my orders, and I must obey them. I musn't allow anybody not actually be longing to the army to pass on across the river on the train." "Throw a piece o' that fat pine on the fire. Shorty," said the Deacon, "and let's see what I've got." "Further admonitions," continued the Lieutenant, "had the same result, and I was about to call a guard to put him under arrest, when I happened to notice a pair of field-glasses that the prisoner had picked up, and was evidently intending to appropriate to his own use, and not account for them. This was confirmed by his approaching me in a menacing manner, insolently demanding their return, and threatening me in a loud voice if I did not give them up, which I properly refused to do, and ordered a Sergeant who had come up to seize and buck-and-gag him. The Sergeant, against whom I shall appear later, did not obey my orders, but seemed to abet his companion's gross insubordination. The scene finally culminated, in the presence of a number of enlisted men, in the prisoner's wrenching the field-glasses away from me by main force, and would have struck me had not the Sergeant prevented this. It was such an act as in any other army in the world would have subjected the offender to instant execution. It was only possible in—" "Don't soft-soap me," the old woman snapped. "I'm too old for it and I'm too tough for it. I want to look at some facts, and I want you to look at them, too." She paused, and nobody said a word. "I want to start with a simple statement. We're in trouble." RE: Fruyling's World "MACDONALD'S GATE" "Read me some of it." "Well, I want something better than that." HoME大香蕉第一时间
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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.