Who's Watching You?

The Saw-Whet owl is a very small bird, four or five inches high and weighing only a few ounces. It is covered with fine, downy feathers and has eyes like a Keane Painting (you know the Big Eyes art.) The tiny beak is curved and very sharp, as are the claws. When we catch an owl in the mist net, we bring him into the banding station (the living room) in a small bag. There it is. An adorable bundle of feathers ready to take on all comers. It is weighed and the wing measured to determine its sex (females are heavier than males) its health assessed and the band put on. Then it is returned to the bag and left on the porch, so its eyes could adjust to the light. Owls can't move their eyeballs the way humans can, but they can turn their head almost three hundred sixty degrees to see. With their ability to swivel their heads from side to side while flying, make ear adjustments to accommodate changing sounds, and fly silently, an owl, even small Saw-Whets like this one, are formidable hunters.

Who did we catch, on the night I was helping to band birds? Two juvenile females. Juveniles, like youngsters of any species, take time to learn the skills they need to survive, and even though it was a bright moonlight night, a night when most owls would see the drift-net, these two were caught.

What is the secret life of animals and birds, and how do we evaluate intelligence? All living beings have a skill-set that they have evolved over time in order to stay alive, but we human beings don't often think about the brains or the resourcefulness that other species have. For many of us, myself included, the natural world is just a kind of backdrop, a stage set against which our own stories play out.

My friend, Jon tells a story about a hummingbird. He was out in the yard one summer day when a hummingbird flew directly toward him, hovering just in front of his face, its tiny wings beating furiously. It seemed, Jon says, that the bird was trying to get a message to him. 

Finally, Jon realized what the message was. He walked around the house and sure enough, the feeder was empty. He took the feeder into the house, filled it, and returned it to its hanger. Within minutes the hummingbird was there.

Animal psychologist Dr. Andrew Iwaniuk of the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada says that hummingbirds, who weigh about .07 ounces, have a hippocampus five times larger than songbirds, seabirds and woodpeckers. With this large hippocampus, they can remember the hundreds of flowers they visit, the quality of the nectar and a host of additional spatial-temporal information. Scientists believe that hummingbirds brains became so developed, because they travel long distances and don't have time or energy to waste looking for food. With this big hippocampus, hummingbirds can remember not only where the nectar feeder is, but recognize the person who fills it.

 Which brings us to spiders. Spiders have the benefit of silk, which they can release from their abdomen and use for all kinds of useful things. When a spiderling hatches, it stands on raised legs with its abdomen pointed upward ("tiptoeing") and releases several silk threads. These threads form a triangular shaped parachute with which it can launch itself into the air. The spider is so light that even a very slight breeze will get it airborne, and even in windless conditions, the earth's static field can provide lift. Anyone who has seen an incredibly long spider web can appreciate the daring it takes to launch oneself into the air with only a small silk thread for safety. Spiders do use their threads for safety, dropping down from the web when a predator arrives, or pulling themselves up on the same thread to get away from danger below. Spiders use threads not only to wrap up food, but to haul it up to the web. Spiders can also balloon up into the air, using hundreds of silk strands to form a triangular sheet of up to 39 inches. In Australia in 2012 millions of spiders ballooned into the air and landed, making the spiderweb- covered ground look like it had snowed. Spiders have ballooned themselves onto ship's sails over 990 miles from land. They have been detected in atmospheric data balloons, 16,000 feet above sea level. Ballooning is probably the most common ways that spiders use to invade islands and mountaintops. Even if they drop into water while ballooning, they can raise their legs or abdomens to use as sails, propelling themselves across the water, or dropping silk anchors to keep themselves in place while paddling.

So who is the more intelligent creature, man, the spider or the hummingbird? My friend Sue tells a wonderful story about the winter she spent as a graduate student with Native Americans in Canada. Sue is a very smart person, a college professor with a PhD in Anthropology who is well-read and very articulate. By any measure of smarts, Sue is it. And yet she describes the winter she spent with the tribe when they tried to teach her to construct a rabbit snare as terribly discouraging. Catching rabbits was an important skill with the tribe, one the natives all knew how to do, because it was their way of acquiring food. Even the five year olds could construct snares, but Sue, who admits she is very clumsy, could not do it.

The elders of the tribe declared her stupid, and over and over tried to teach her how to build a rabbit snare. "I was heartbroken," Sue says. "I wanted to show them I was as smart as they were, but they thought I was just a dumb white woman, who would never be able to feed herself. It was only later, when I could use my skill as a researcher to help them file land claims against the Canadian government, that they were willing to admit I wasn't so dumb after all."

I think of all these things in the evening as we stand in the darkened woods, ready to release the tiny Saw-Whet owl that has just been banded. Because of the full moon, I can see pretty clearly into the woods, but the tiny owl being lifted onto my shoulder can see 100 times better in this dim light than I can. The owl can also hear better. The great grey owl can hear rodents scurrying beneath two feet of snow, and our hosts says an owl can hear the recorded call we use to lure them in, up to a distance of five miles.

The world is silent. I can feel the owl my shoulder shifting around, adjusting its eyesight to the dark. We wait, and then with an almost silent flap of its wings it is off into its world. 

Who is up there in the trees watching you?