This chapter ponders with amazement on the animals of the air. The ability to escape the surly bonds of earth gives birds a degree of freedom from human interference, not open to land mammals. The only species that have succumbed to domestication are (almost) flightless birds such as chickens and turkeys. The ability to fly carries great advantages in respect to essentials of life like foraging for food and escape from predation. However, birds need to keep their weight down. With a few exceptions therefore, birds are better equipped for flight than fight.

While this chapter may be short on answers, it asks the same questions as those critical to our understanding of the minds of any sentient species. What are the things that matter most? What are the features of the physical and social environment that determine these priorities? What are the skills and properties of the sentient mind that enable them to cope with the challenges of the environment? We must begin, as always, with a restatement of basic principles. All lifeforms, plant and animal are designed and operate to meet their basic needs and promote their genetic fitness and much of this is instinctive. Basic needs include access to sufficient food and water to sustain life, protection from the elements, safety and security from predation and breeding success, Animals with one or more of the powers of deep sentience; perception, mental formulation and possibly consciousness, can build on their mental birthright and develop their minds through a combination of experience, learning and practice.

Birds, direct descendants of reptiles, have adapted to every ecological niche on earth, water and the shorelines where they meet. The variety of habitats inhabited by birds and the range of strategies they have developed to deal with the challenges presented by these habitats is vast. Our fascination with these abilities has generated an immense amount of scientific investigation into bird behaviour, motivation and special skills, to which this chapter cannot begin to do justice. Here, I restrict myself to examination, by way of a few examples, of how much the success of birds in meeting their basic needs is built into their intrinsic genetic birthright and how much may be linked to deeper cognitive and emotional aspects of sentience. These include complex mental formulations such as navigation and problem solving, communication and social skills, and higher emotions such as empathy and compassion.

When each individual bird leaves the protection of its parents, it is programmed to find a supply of food appropriate to its design for eating and digestion, find a mate with whom to reproduce, select a breeding zone and individual nest site that will combine security with access to a source of sufficient food for all, then work hard to provide food and instruction to give the offspring the physical ability and mental skills necessary for independent survival. As parents, birds are powerfully motivated to do their best for their brood. There will be many failures but, so long as the population is maintained, the exercise will succeed.

Feeding Strategies

Birds are commonly classified according to their feeding habits as:

• Carnivores: raptors, eagles, hawks and other birds of prey
  
  
  
  • carrion eaters: vultures, carrion crows
    
  • fish eaters: pelagic birds, albatross, Arctic terns.
  
  
• Frugivores: fruit eaters, e.g. orioles, waxwings
  
• Granivores: seed eaters, e.g. sparrows, tits, finches, chickens
  
• Insectivores: swallows, swifts, flycatchers, warblers
  
• Mollluscivores: waders and other shoreline birds
  
• Omnivores: gulls, blackbirds, chickens

This classification is far from definitive. For any species of bird to succeed, it must either have continuous access to a wide range of food sources that it can grasp, swallow and digest and/or preferential access to a food supply that is inaccessible, or less accessible to other competing species. Darwin’s finches on the Galapagos evolved different shaped beaks that enabled them to harvest different fruits, nuts and insects, thereby exploiting the full range of food on offer with minimal competition. Birds of prey are designed and motivated to hunt and kill. Waders and other birds of the shoreline like the avocets, dunlin, oystercatcher and spoonbill, have evolved distinctive beaks adapted to specialist feeding behaviour. Avocets and spoonbills sweep the shallows for small aquatic creatures, dunlin and oystercatchers peck around the tideline for molluscs and other small shellfish. Swallows and swifts have adapted their bodies to a life spent mostly on the wing in order to harvest the abundant crop of flying insects. While these specialisations give preferential access to a particular feed source, they limit the range of foods on offer. When that supply is seasonal, birds with specialised feeding habits have to move with it. Swans and geese that feed mainly on grasses and other vegetation, summer in the subarctic but migrate south for the winter. Swallows winter in the tropics and migrate north for the summer to breed at a time when the insect population is at its highest and the days are long.

It is self‐evident why geese migrate south (or to warmer climes) for the winter. It is not immediately self‐evident why swallows should migrate north for the summer. The tropical forests should provide a plentiful year‐round source of insects. The Darwinian explanation for migration behaviour is that a subset of birds within certain species, e.g. insectivorous species like the swallow, migrated north while the remainder of the population retained the easier option of a settled life in the tropics. The migrants succeeded because, on average, they raised a larger number of offspring. Likely reasons for this include longer daylight hours to give them more time to gather food, less predation of their nests and the probability of raising a greater number of clutches during the summer months. This made them the fitter, so they survived, so now all swallows migrate. Migration is a striking example of the fact that the successful option, measured in terms of the fitness of the population, is not necessarily the easiest option as might be chosen by the sentient individual, motivated by the desire for a life of comfort and security involving as little work as possible. The motivation to migrate appears to be hard‐wired. The strategies involved in planning the journey require some very impressive properties of mind.

Those birds that do not migrate are those that have year‐round access to food that they are adapted to eat. Birds of prey (raptors) have access at all times to smaller birds and mammals like mice and shrews. However, their numbers are constrained by the numbers of their prey. If the numbers of prey decline, or the number of raptors increases after a particularly successful breeding season, individuals will go short of food. The first consequence of a reduction in food supply for most animals is usually a fall in the reproductive rate. Adults may survive but produce fewer chicks. It follows that we shall never be overrun by raptors.

The most successful of the wild birds are the opportunist omnivores like gulls and crows. It should come as no surprise that they are also extremely smart, since they have devised a wide range of strategies for getting food without recourse to the rigours of hunting or migration. In Chapter 4, I described the range of skills demonstrated in laboratory studies on developing complex strategies for getting food from flasks, seen but out of reach. Crows in the wild devise a wide range of strategies to get at inaccessible food, like the meat inside molluscs. These include relatively primitive approaches like hitting a mussel with a stone, dropping it from a height on to a hard surface and, my favourite, taking them to a car park, then carefully placing them at a spot where they know they will get run over by a car tyre.

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