April 6, 2007

The lake effect snow did not materialize here. Just a few inches this morning. It got warm so by the time I got home the grass was visible, then another 4 inches in the late afternoon and early evening.

I was reading by the front window. The Phoebe came by and landed on the walk. dropped its’ wings for about 20 seconds, then flew into the holly in the corner where the garage extends toward the road. I was thinking how it must be tough for the Phoebe with this much snow. An insectivorous bird with a prolonged cold snap. I went back to reading and was startled when the Phoebe flew into the window then landed in the Red bud across the walk looking at me. I realized the front feeder was empty and went out to fill it.

Hitting the window to get my attention is something the other birds do on a regular basis. A bird will hit the window of the room where I am then perch and look at me. If the feeder is empty they will fly to the feeder. If there is a hawk they will fly toward the hawk. To have the Phoebe do this was a surprise. Why would the Phoebe want to get my attention? I know some will call me crazy or say I am anthropomorphizing this behavior. Still I have come to recognize this as meaning the bird wants me to do something. I filled the feeder, and put some suet out in front. Why the Phoebe cannot get suet from the feeder in back I don’t know.

One other observation. When I walked out with the seed the Phoebe flew off, but a Robin was sitting on the gutter above the feeder and stayed there until I opened the feeder. Was the Phoebe doing the Robin’s bidding? I don’t know. I can only ask the question.

We humans think we are so intelligent yet we cannot decipher the most basic interactions of the animals around us. We are suffering from our own chauvinism and arrogance. It has been over a hundred years since my namesake, Hans the horse was shown to be following subtle unintentional clues from his owner rather than actually doing arithmetic. But to my mind that was the beginning of a long dark age in our understanding of animal behavior. It is interesting that today some behaviorists hypothesize that we humans have no free will. I see this as an outgrowth of the ideas that other animals are just automata, the need for dissertation topics, the proliferation of PhDs and that Universities have granted them to idiots for the last 40 or so years. I use "idiot" in the vernacular or popular sense rather than the classical.

I have no conviction about understanding the motivations of the animals around me. My ideas about their behavior are just speculation. Still we humans do have some basic understanding of cause an effect. Sure we get it horribly wrong sometimes. But we also do occasionally get it right. I have no illusions about “the truth”. Yet when it comes to the behavior of humans or other species it is nearly impossible to construct valid scientific experiments. As a result these are areas not worthy of scientific inquiry. Yet we still do experimentation based upon artificial circumstance and draw larger conclusions. Perhaps with our fellow humans this has a degree of validity because we can communicate with each other to some degree. With other species I could make the argument that they are better at learning how to communicate with us than we are with them. Yet now that we are emerging from a dark age, and now that we accept the evidence that intelligence an be present in nervous systems very unlike our own, we can at least admit that when it comes to the other species around us we simply don’t know. At least not in the sense that we can gather repeatable evidence.