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DJ Discusses the Fluffbutts

Birdbrains and ape-training

Chickie on one lag, happy, practicing her Life Song in Sue's office

DJ again. After a night of basically no sleep at all. Which seems to be bullish on me doing a shama post since I’m not functional to do much else.

As discussed in yesterday’s post, we’re now supplying high-grade live mealworms for the feeding of the remaining cuties. I thought a discussion of those dynamics might interest you - whoever you are, in the future, reading this. Presumably a shama fancier, a friend of the family, or someone seeking to quote me wildly out of context.

As I say, I’m providing live mealworms for the chicks…. but those are costly at $80-100 per lb and hard to keep fresh and alive; they tend to pupate quickly, having a programmed agenda which is other than bird food. Freeze-dried chinese mealworms are available from Amazon at under $25 for 5lbs, and once those are boiled to rehydrate that’s more like 10lbs, so a vast difference in price and storeablilty. And for birds above about a week old, perfectly fine food.

This means that I don’t want the adult birds eating up all the live mealworms. There will probably be one more litter of chicks this breeding season, and I’d like enough left over for them too, by dint of refrigeration.

This means, for one thing, not giving them to Bird. He will take them to the chicks IF he thinks they’re really super hungry and might not survive, and he did so when we initially introduced them. But once they were better fed, which he seems to think he has a good line on, he’d start just gulping them down himself. When I stop handing them to him and offer him a little cup of the chinese deadworms, he looks at me like I’ve failed him, and eyeballs the chinese worms skeptically with one eyeball after another for quite awhile, before finally eating a few and then flying off in a huff.

Birdlet, as ever, is the parent who selflessly feeds the chicks to satiation and only then eats stuff herself, so handing them to her is the smart way to go. I should note that while I will often offer them a small plastic cup full of chinese deadworms, which they are used to eating from in my hand, I do not do that with the live ones, since I think that would send a sign of abundance I don’t want to send. Rather, I hand them out one mealworm at a time to be plucked from my thumb and forefinger grasp by accurate beaks and sharp eyes.

Which leads me to some discussions of behavior, learning, and - dare I say it - interspecies communication on a low level. Because I wanted to convey to Birdlet that the soft live ones were for the chicks and the chinese worms were for the adults. These birds kinda know that the chicks can only have the soft live ones since they weren’t feeding them the others. However, holding the notion in their little pointed heads that there are two distinct grades of mealworms and that they should conserve the “best ones” for the chicks when they can’t SEE the supply is a bit of a concept. And Bird simply feeds the chicks until he thinks they aren’t starving, and then eats whatever he gets a shot at, while Birdlet feeds them to satiation and only then will swallow a live one.

So I started offering her the tray of deadworms first, to eat her fill. Which she will do. Then she stays sitting there on the top railing of our stair landing and says “foooooo…” in her little voice while looking at me, waiting patiently without taking more dead worms for herself. I’ll then hand her a live one and she’ll immediately stoop down to the ground to peck it and then carry it to the nesting box, and will do that without break until they are full, at which point she goes down to the stainless steel birdbath and had a drink and a shower.

In other words, she clear knows that (a) I have an unseen supply of live mealworms, and that upon her eating her fill of the dead ones, she can prompt me to give her one by saying “foooooo…..” quietly.  This implies assumptions in her little head of the existence of something she can’t see (I keep them indoors) as well as an assumption about her ability to tell me to give them to her and my ability and likelihood to respond, while she ignores the dead worms in front of her.

And today she altered that behavior, as indeed she did on the second of the 2019 broods. It will proceed as before; she coming to the railing outside the door and calling a soft “foooo…” until I let her eat her fill of chinese deadworms, and then stopping her eating, fixing me with her gaze, and saying “fooooo….” again. (Often while her mate and various other bird species, and Tawny, are flying around and trying to chase her away, she steadfastly circles back.) But the alteration: After doing it the way she had been doing it, today after being handed the first live worm, she stood her ground with the worm in her beak and stared at me rather than flying off with it. And waited. Finally I handed her another one, and she immediately swooped to the ground to peck them. Thereafter, she has utterly consistently asked for two live ones per trip, even saying “foooooo….” if I don’t do it quickly enough. She never asks for three, and also now never asks for one. She wants two, and will sit with infinite patience staring at me, and saying “fooooo……” as necessary to get me to do my part. So she has altered my behavior along with hers.

In order to do this, she needs to be able to do more than just count to two. She needs to have a concept that I have a larger store of live mealworms than she can see, that I volitionally give her one at a time, and that she can alter my behavior by communicating with me. I wonder, but do not yet know, if she has precisely two surviving chicks in the nesting box, and this represents some level of egalitarian distribution on each trip, one for each child, like a human mom buying cookies to prevent fights. Why does she never ask for three? She could in principle carry five or more. But she knows how many she wants… she will wait a long time for the second worm, but takes off in a fraction of a second after getting it. When asking for two, they always go to the chicks, never to herself.

This is clearly an improvement on an optimal foraging strategy, and it relies on deductions she has made about my behavior, about my resources she can’t see but believes exist, and about my receptiveness to “foooo…..” commands and ability to intrepret them.

She has, in the past used the “foooo….” language as a series of yes/no questions to model my wife’s behavior, meaning apparently “do a different thing now”. Like, she’ll fly to the top of Sue’s compost bin, and say “foooo….”, meaning take the lid off this bin, using the “foooo…” to modify the designation of the bid as the object to be acted upon.  If Sue does something which isn’t sufficiently like what Birdlet wants, she’ll fail to act on it and just keep saying “foooo….” until Sue does what she wanted and she then take sher own action, such as rooting for beetles in the bin. This simple language is surprisingly efficient at conveying somewhat complex concepts, since there aren’t all that many alternate actions to do in a given yard; and breaking the world down into binary “foooo….” and not “foooo….” choices can quickly shape a behavior. But y’know, it’s hard to figure how Birdlet would even do this without some sort of effective “theory of mind or agency” on the part of us apes. It’s unmistakable a sonic communication and it’s unmistakably directed at the humans. I have never heard her say “foooo….” to another bird, and I’ve heard her say MANY other things, including a lot of stuff she never says to me. That is, she doesn’t use bird words on apes, and doesn’t say “fooooo…” to any birds, even to her chicks, though she says stuff to her chicks she doesn’t say to anybody else, like “uh uh uh uh” if she has food and they won’t take it.

And she’s fully capable of doing a full-throated epic shama song many minutes long and intricate,














anyhow, like I say, a slow day. Tawny will be putting the finishing touches on his Life Song any time now, he was gone all day yesterday but back this morning to harass his mom and be chased by his dad, which was his pattern the other day too… gone for a day adventuring and then back for take-out chinese in our kitchen, where his dad won’t chase him. We see this pattern sometimes.

Reckon we’ll have Cuties in the coming weeks.

Rocket happily practicing his Life Song with F-bombs, on one foot

and who knows what the hell that is saying but I THINK none of them do the exact same one. In fact, a week or so before the chicks leave, they’ll practice their "life song" “sotto voce” in a bush or something, and I’ve recorded portions of some of them. Very quiet, not for other birds to hear but just to compose and memorize for when they belt it out full volume. They do this after a good meal when feeling fairly good about themselves, generally about 2-5’ off the ground in a bush, and it lasts a long time… as in, I’ve recorded partial songs on my cel phone which lasted 8 or so minutes, so the full song may be a half-hour or so long. And it may beggar belief, but I can tell that these songs are distinct; for instance, “Rocket” had a very different song than “Chickie” his sibling; Rocket’s contained profanity and hers didn’t… shama profanity being clicks and scolds, which totally fit his irascible personality. He worked those into his life song, while no other chick I’ve heard had done that. But that’s another whole discussion.