The Thing with Feathers (23 page)

Each study seemed to raise more questions than answers, partly because of the difficulty in assessing the mental states of animals without being able to communicate directly with them. So Gallup decided to shift his focus from chimpanzees and monkeys to a more familiar species: humans.

People have an interesting relationship with mirrors. Studies show that babies can’t recognize their own reflections until they are about eighteen months old. Most children develop the ability by the age of two, with a few notable exceptions. For instance, some mentally disabled people never learn to recognize their own image. Self-recognition is often delayed in people with autism, and up to 30 percent of autistics never learn it at all. Patients with schizophrenia are likewise apt to respond to their reflections as if to another person. Some Alzheimer’s patients also lose the ability to recognize themselves late in life.

There have been several cases of brain-damaged people who suddenly lose self-recognition, including one man who could identify other people in mirrors but not himself. The damaged area is usually located somewhere in the right prefrontal cortex of the brain—just above and behind your right eyeball—which suggests that self-recognition can be attributed to that specific region. In one captivating study, epileptic patients were each shown a hybrid photo of their own face combined with a celebrity’s face while either the right or left side of their brain was anesthetized. Those with the left side of their brain “turned off” recognized themselves in the photo, but those with the right side anesthetized did not.

At about the same time that babies begin to recognize their own reflection, they start becoming aware of the thoughts and
feelings of others—for instance, by showing embarrassment or trying to help a mother in distress. Gallup believed these two conditions are linked. Only by having a sense of self, he reasoned, can you make inferences about others’ thoughts and actions. Thus, only creatures with self-awareness should display gratitude, deception, empathy, sympathy, humor, and associated mental states.

That’s a pretty significant connection if most of the world’s animals really don’t have a sense of self. Perhaps the world is divided into creatures that can comprehend their own being—and infer about the experiences of others—and those that merely see others as mates or competition. (Farther down the slippery scale of consciousness, trees, amoebas, and other less-aware living things could constitute a third group.) If that’s true, according to Gallup, your pet dog or cat falls into the second category, along with most birds, but magpies belong in the first—with us.

Whether the mirror test accurately measures selfhood is debatable, partly because the test allows the possibility of false negatives. One researcher showed that young children who had been marked with face rouge passed the test more often if they first watched someone else remove a spot of rouge from their own face, indicating that the mark was undesirable. Animals might likewise identify a mark on themselves without bothering to remove it. Also, many animals rely mainly on senses besides eyesight; dogs, for instance, are oriented to smell rather than sight, so might not react to a mirror even if they did possess a sense of self-awareness.

The prefrontal cortex is known to be linked to personality, prediction, and episodic memory—the brain’s ability to “time travel” to recall past events at particular places and times—and probably helps make decisions about socially responsible
behavior. This was demonstrated in a famous case from 1848, when Phineas Gage, an unfortunate railroad construction worker, had an iron rod driven through his skull from the back of his left cheek to the top of his head, passing behind his eyeball and through the brain en route. Though he survived the accident and recovered, his friends noticed a frightening change in his personality afterward. Overnight, Gage transformed from a well-adjusted human being into an irritable and quick-tempered man, and stayed that way. He also became inefficient and impatient at work even though he could perform tasks with the same dexterity as before. More recent studies have shown that the prefrontal cortex controls our ability to delay instant gratification in favor of a greater long-term result—something that most birds may not be able to do, at least consciously.

Magpies, with their mischievous personality, ability to recognize individual predators, and unique social behaviors that hint at emotion—such as holding funerals—are good candidates to develop the sense of self that we associate with intelligence. They have relatively large brains, comparable to apes and slightly below humans, even if the specific structures are organized differently. So why are we surprised that magpies can recognize themselves in a mirror? They may not be building spaceships, but we probably don’t give them enough credit for their street smarts.

By the same logic, we shouldn’t expect all birds to pass the mirror test. In 1981, a group of researchers decided to show that pigeons could do it. They expended inordinate efforts in training the birds to peck at marks on their body that were visible only in a mirror. Nobody, including the experimenters, ever argued that the pigeons could spontaneously recognize their own reflections. Rather, the study was a challenge to the
mirror test, suggesting that its results should not necessarily be interpreted as self-awareness, because even animals lacking self-recognition could be taught to pass. In the end, the pigeons did appear to pass the test, but their performance showed no hint of spontaneous recognition, only rigorous training.

Gallup was not impressed by the pigeon experiment. “Training an animal to respond to marks on its body, without collateral evidence of self-recognition,” he later wrote, “indicates more about the achievements of the researchers who designed the training procedures than any underlying ability of the animal.”

Nothing, in other words, can replace that magic spark when you gaze into a mirror and recognize the curious face staring back, eyeball to eyeball, as your own. From Snow White’s vain stepmother to Michael Jackson’s haunting lyrics “I’m starting with the man in the mirror, I’m asking him to change his ways . . . ,” we humans have long been fascinated by mirror images. On reflection, we might recognize some part of ourselves in Mr. Magpie.

arts and craftiness

THE AESTHETICS OF BOWERBIRD SEDUCTION

O
n a blistering afternoon in the Australian outback, when I stumbled into my first bower, I thought it was some kind of religious altar or maybe a practical joke. I’d been tramping through dense bush all morning and unexpectedly emerged into a fifteen-foot-wide clearing, in the center of which stood a wickerlike construction, about two feet high, resembling a small hut. It was formed of twigs woven vertically into two thick, parallel walls that created a tunnel in between, and just outside each entrance lay a pile of white stones, bleached bones, and green leaves, clearly arranged by design. The whole tidy array was surrounded by an expanse of ground so bare that I wondered whether it had been vacuumed.

As I puzzled over the curious offering, a football-sized brown bird materialized on a branch at the edge of the clearing, announcing its presence with an explosion of chattering and snapping sounds. Suddenly, it all made sense. I had wandered into the bachelor pad of Australia’s winged Casanova, the serial womanizer of the avian kingdom—the great bowerbird.

I stepped back a few paces and tried to recall everything I knew about bowerbirds while this one, apparently a trusting sort, hopped down to ground level and with barely a glance in my direction set to work on his bower. He first checked over the piles of loose objects, which must have been selected and gathered with care from the surrounding bush. Head cocked, he stepped around the stones and leaves to admire his creation from various angles, occasionally darting in to nudge one of the objects with his beak like a painter correcting some tiny mistake. Satisfied, the bird then spent a few minutes weaving
fresh twigs into the bower, painstakingly poking them in one at a time to strengthen the hut. I stood in quiet amazement: This was like watching a nature documentary on TV.

Bowerbirds have long been renowned for their bizarre and compelling courtship rituals. Instead of using just songs or bright feathers to attract a mate, male bowerbirds create elaborate structures to show off their unique talents of architecture and design, dedicating great energy to the task. Building the perfect bower can take ten months of each year, but it’s a worthy project because females pick their mates solely by inspecting these bachelor pads, open-house-style. After mating on the spot, the female flies off to build a separate nest, lay eggs, and raise chicks by herself. Male bowerbirds can’t afford to spend that much time away from their life’s work, or they’ll lose their seductive edge. A successful male might mate with dozens of females over the course of one season.

About twenty species of bowerbirds occupy Australia and New Guinea, and they all, uniquely among birds, display variations on this behavior. Each species has its own taste. The satin bowerbird of eastern Australia, metallic black with blue eyes, decorates its bowers with bright blue objects—berries, leaves, bottle caps, straws, ballpoint pens, plastic spoons, clothespins, anything in the right hue. The male regent bowerbird, a striking black-and-yellow bird, also from eastern Australia, paints the inside of its bower with a sticky, pea-green concoction of crushed plants mixed with saliva; females like to taste the paint when they step inside. The Vogelkop bowerbird of western New Guinea, an unassuming olive-colored bird about the size of a thrush, builds triangular huts in the rainforest and adds a mat of moss next to the entrance like a front lawn, which can cover several square meters, on which it
displays eye-catching arrangements of hundreds of bright berries, beetle wings, and flowers.

The great bowerbird, from northern Australia, is the largest of the family and builds the biggest bower structures. It vaguely resembles a big, chunky robin, fawn brown all over, with scaly patterning on the back and staring, black eyes. Males have a small, muted patch of pink feathers on the nape; otherwise, males and females look pretty much alike in their drab plumage. Great bowerbirds tend to prefer green and white objects for decoration, as in the arrangement I discovered of green leaves, white stones, and bleached bones. Rocks, bones, sun-bleached dung, shells, berries, leaves, and other natural debris are typical, but human trash is also fair game. Broken glass, plastic, marbles, and nails seem to be most alluring.

One photographer documented a single great bowerbird in Queensland that had collected bits of rope, lots of broken green glass, bottle caps, lids, a plastic elephant, and a toy soldier. When a researcher tried adding colorful bits of wire to several bowers, to see if the birds would incorporate them into their displays, he stirred up trouble—neighboring male bowerbirds kept stealing the wire from one another. Though the form remains relatively constant within each species, individual birds take advantage of local resources, which can lead to fads in particular areas and in particular years. If a bunch of green plastic becomes available, suddenly green plastic will be all the rage.

Bowerbird fashion has probably been driven by sexual selection in the same way as, say, a peacock’s long tail has. In the case of the peacock, females preferentially mated with long-tailed males over time, so those with short tails were eventually weeded out of the population. The same process can work with
behavior. At some point in the past, female bowerbirds began to prefer males that collected precious objects, so those were the birds that passed on their genes; the more often females picked these males, the showier their displays became, in a loop of positive feedback. Bowers might be seen as part of a bowerbird’s extended phenotype—a term coined by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins to include not just the physical body but also any external characteristic of an animal that affects the passing of its genes. Bowers are subject to evolution just like a spiderweb or a termite mound.

Humans, too, are subject to sexual selection. Males with more possessions and creativity are generally more likely to attract women, as is true for bowerbirds. Art is one form of wealth, and, in a sense, artists send out signals that might arise from primal courtship urges. But this is a limited and clinical view of art: Surely we can appreciate artistic endeavors without the need to link them to seduction. There are many reasons to create art, including no reason at all, and some argue that true artists are those who express creativity for its own sake. It’s hard to look at a great bowerbird’s decorated bower, on which the bird has lavished so much time in tasteful arrangement, without seeing artistry. As I stood sweating in the Australian bush, watching this strange bird move his precious stones and leaves by millimeters in pursuit of the perfect visual pattern, I marveled at his designs. I wondered: Is this bird just carrying out his instinctive duty, or is he an artist? Is there even a difference?

—

THE DEFINITION OF
ARTIST
naturally depends on the definition of
art
, and art is one of those slippery concepts that seems intuitive but defies strict boundaries. Philosophically speaking, any
single definition of art may be pointless or even harmful, as any box, no matter how big, could limit creativity. But there are a few things most definitions agree on.