Daniel T. Baldassarre, assistant professor of zoology at SUNY Oswego, is asking a very important question in the latest issue of the Scientific Journal of Research & Reviews: “What’s the Deal with Birds?”
Birds are very strange. Some people are like “whoa they’re flying around and stuff, what’s the deal with that?” This sentiment is shared by people across socioeconomic backgrounds. Figuring out what the deal is with birds is of the utmost scientific importance. It is now widely appreciated that the majority of socially monogamous passerine species are weird [1]. In species with moderately high extra-pair mating and paternal care, we need to understand what is going on with them [2]. In territorial species, what are they even doing [3] and they do all sorts of weird stuff [4] (but see [5]). In addition, there is a rich body of literature on how birds – which are very strange feathered creatures [6] – can strengthen the pair bond and signal commitment, or directly guard against extrapair copulations (EPCs) [7-9]. Despite these insights, the relative weirdness of birds as opposed to other animals is yet untested.
So, naturally, he studied them.
I looked at three different birds: a woodpecker, a parrot, and a penguin. I looked really close at them, squinting and everything, to try and figure out what was up with them.…Briefly, I watched them really close for quite a while [13-15]. To eliminate potential confounds, I thus conducted my experiments only on animals that I knew for sure were birds, and no other things like bugs and bats.
His conclusion? Though it’s the first study Baldassarre is aware of to “attempt to quantify the deal with birds,” the results were, sadly, “ambiguous.”
Not that I want to argue with a guy who holds a PhD from Cornell University’s vaunted Lab of Ornithology, but, as it happens, I know exactly what the deal with birds is: They’re not real.
