Hi Tweets,

Lydia Gaebe writes:

>My sister heard that someone once saw a BIRD FEEDING A FISH!

True, but acccording to the story, it didn't turn out well for the fish.

>Supposedly the dumb birds saw fish gulping air at the surface of a pond
>and began feeding the fish as they gulped air.

Well, firstly, most birds aren't dumb because they react to a stimulus
reflexively any more than we are when, equally reflexively, we jump at a
sudden noise: they're able to get through most of their short lives with a
library of coded instinctive reactions and some learned behaviors that cover
most of the situations they're likely to encounter. Most have never needed
to develop intelligence (with many birds, memory matters far more) and
haven't. Intelligence itself seems an adaptive side-effect of
omnivorousness, bestowing advantages in finding new food sources, shelter
and so on. We humans preen ourselves on our intelligence relative to other
animals, but it's an invidious comparison; most get along without it, or
need very little, to live their lives in their ordained ways.

There's a description by an ornithologist (name forgotten, sorry)--and I
believe there's film as well--of a Green Heron Butorides virescens at
streamside using a piece of bread in moving water to attract fish, then
nailing them as they come to feed on it. It gets better: before the bread
drifted too far, according to the story, the heron picked it out of the
water, turned nearly 180 degrees and put it back in the water an equal
distance upstream to repeat the whole thing, and did so until sated.

It could have learned this trick in nature without needing human help such
as bread. Green Herons may have noticed that fish often congregate beneath
floating things that cast shadows (watch the weird 'Cloak-of-Darkness' dance
that one of the southern US herons does when it's fishing), figured out that
if it kept a floating piece of bark, for example, in the vicinity, the bark
would act as a fish magnet for as long as the bird was hungry. I like that
it figured out cause-and-effect then thought it through to repeat it--to do
this required the ability to abstract this action and its consequences into
the future, pretty skookum thinking for a bird.

>Is this just another "urban legend" or are birds so hard wired to feed
>any open mouth?

Well, that's actually an interesting question--some intrepid soul who
doesn't mind the primal taste of earthworms might want to test the
hypothesis by standing within ten feet of a robin's nest and yawning.

But which birds? It wouldn't be landbirds, fershure, no matter how
hard-wired they were to cough up worms into an open mouth; the feeding
reflex would be quickly overridden by the don't-drown reflex. What
waterbirds, then? Wouldn't be ducks, geese or swans because the young don't
usually feed from the adult's beak--the kids forage themselves almost from
the git-go; likewise grebes, coots, whose young feed from the side of the
adult's beak before they learn to forage for themselves, and, presumably,
loons. Cormorants, maybe, since their young--which incidentally have a gape
like a fire-bucket--are in a nest for some time before fledging. But fish,
even considerable-sized fish, are prey for cormorants and are more likely to
elicit a gonna-eat-ya reflex than a feeding reflex.

Nah, after thinking about it, Lydia, it sounds like guff to me. Now, about
that seafront property in Nebraska I was telling ya about...

Michael Price
Vancouver BC Canada
mprice at mindlink.net