Green Heron fishing

here’s a neat video of a green heron fishing. What makes it unusual is that it’s figured out how to use bait — it grabs pieces of bread and places them out on the water, and then waits for the fish to come up and then snags it.

This kind of action — tool using, effectively — surprises the hell out of people who don’t spend much time around birds. Speaking as someone who’s lived with birds for 20 years now and watches them in the wild often, this kind of adaptation surprises me not at all.

It’s still a lot of fun to watch, but birds are pretty smart animals, smarter than you might think.

One of my favorite cases of this happened in Yosemite, at Tunnel View, where we saw a raven attempt to manipulate the door handle of a car to get inside where it knew there was some food.

It clearly knew that the handle was what opened the door. What you can’t see from the picture is the noises the bird was making. it would go “Boop Boop!” and then rattle the door — it was imitating the sound the car makes when you electronically open the locks. It had figured out that to get in the car, it had to make that noise and then the handle would open the door.

Just be glad Ravens don’t have opposable thumbs, folks.

Although honestly, even that’s not always necessary. Birds tongues and beaks are surprisingly flexible. Our first cockatoo, Morgan, was an acomplished escape artist who took locks (and cages) as challenges. She quickly mastered opening her cage from the inside, and that led to a continuing arms race between us trying to keep her in her cage when we weren’t home, and her proving that we were idiots for trying. that included using various snaps and hooks to keep her from moving the lock handle (the best lasted two weeks) followed by D links (those chain links with a threaded side that opens to connect two chains) — whist lasted three days, and we came home to her standing on top of her cage, opening and closing the link with her tongue and chuckling. We finally moved to a padlock, and she simply disassembled part of her cage one day, which we stopped by simply torquing the bolts beyond her ability to loosen them. then one day she was out of the cage with us and we realized she’d grabbed the combination lock and was turning the knob and watching what happend.

we switched to a key lock, which finally stopped her. But we came home one day and she had a little stick, and was trying to stuff it into the keyhole — she was trying to invent lockpicks.

So nothing birds do surprise me any more. Fortunately, our current cockatoo (Tatiana) isn’t a budding engineer, her preference is to just destroy it instead — and we just bought a heavy-duty cage with nothing she can demolish. At least, not yet.

You might also want to read:

1. x180 / james duncan davidson: A Livable Shade of Green x180 / james duncan davidson: A Livable Shade of Green: A great piece in today’s NY Times: A Livable Shade of Green, by Nicholas D....