Sluta mata mesarna, era jävlar

 

Credit: Ambrogio1997

Har aldrig hört talas om detta tidigare. 

Nya blåmeslarmet: Sluta mata alla småfåglar

Winterland

 

Credit: John Dyson 

So I saw a sparrowhawk in a residential neighborhood earlier today. In a neighborhood, in fact, in which I *never* seen such a bird before. Wat means? No idea. It could be a co-incidence, but another possibility is that the winter is really cold this year, so the hawk has to scout unfamiliar territory. It did succesfully kill another bird (not sure what kind) and ate it. The local magpies gathered in a nearby bush and looked unhappy. I was surprised that they didn´t band together and attacked the hawk - are the raptors *that* badass?

Is this an omen? I mean, I half-jokingly declared the magpie to be my spirit-animal a while back. Of course, the magpies have been attacking the local Paridae for a while now, so if the hawk´s victim was a Pica, I suppose this was simply another natural cycle in the food chain... 

Tättingar

 

Ibland missförstår AI mina promptar på det mest häpnadsväckande sätt. Ni kan aldrig gissa vad prompten var som föranledde AI att generera ovanstående illustration! 

Okej, det var "azurmes i vinterskog". En azurmes (azur-mes) är alltså en liten fågel. Dock verkar färgerna stämma. Azurmesar är faktiskt vita och blå...

Dreams of a Russian invasion

 

The bird above is a Coal Tit (although the wrong subspecies). The one we have around here presumably looks more like a dimunitive Great Tit (pun unintended). I say "presumably", since until the last week or so, I didn´t even know these birds existed! Then, I read in some newspaper that there is currently "an invasion of Russian Coal Tits in Stockholm", with the miniature birds crashing into buildings and stuff?!

When I visited Stockholm recently (still looking for the Gubbängen monster, obviously), I noticed a flock of small birds which confused me. "Damn, the Great Tits are very small this season", I thought to myself. At least I think I did. Or did I just dream the whole thing? 

If so, it must be some kind of weird synchronicity that I read in the newspaper about the unknown bird I dreamed of a few days earlier. I hope the "Russian invasion" thing is just a figure of speech! I mean, it´s not like Russian birds crashing into buildings is an omen of a foreign drone-attack on Sweden or anything.

Right? 

Maybe I should just hide in the forest together with that monster...

The greatest tit

"Smartast bland mesar" (Smartest of tits) is a book by Anders Brodin, a professor of biology at the university of Lund in Sweden. The book is a popularized account of Brodin´s and others´ research into the cognitive abilities of birds, with special emphasis on the Great Tit (Parus major). It does come across as a rambling college lecture at times, with the author talking about...well, everything really...but somewhere in there, he does tell us a lot about the ostensible topic of the exercise. The Great Tit, remember?

Weirdly, the tits (Paridae) are considered to be among the smartest of birds, up there with parrots and corvids. They even have *some* cognitive abilities on par with chimpanzees! This is something of a mystery, since tits are small songbirds with dimunitive brain volumes. Among the tits, the Great Tit stands out as particularly clever - and particularly annoying. Thank god I don´t live in a tit-infested neighborhood, it seems pretty taxing. 

One thing I liked about the book is that Brodin doesn´t sound particularly dogmatic, he never tries to tell the reader "what Science actually says about Reality" or expound on the "the party line". Instead, he is willing to admit that there might be differences between how tits act in nature and how they come across during weird scientific experiments set up by humans. Also, tests of cognitive abilities tend to be human-centered, such as the "mirror recognition test". Great Tits habitually fail them, despite being smart in many other ways. And while Brodin seems fairly securely anchored in Neo-Darwinism, he is brave enough to admit that perhaps there might be some evidence for group selection, or at least against kin selection, although it seems unlikely. 

Perhaps this is trivial (isn´t this how a scientist *should* sound like?), but after reading tons of cock sure symbola in other science books, "Smartast bland mesar" does feel like a breath of fresh air. Brodin is particularly fascinated by a British amateur researcher, Len Howard, author of "Birds as individuals". It seems Howard was a typical British excentric, who let Great Tits (and other birds) practically live inside her house, and she was constantly surrounded by them as she walked down the street in her home town. Several reports of Great Tit behavior in Howard´s book are apparently unique. 

Brodin ends by pointing out that the recent revolution in DNA testing has created havoc in the evolutionary tree of birds. The world´s smallest corvid, Hume´s Ground Jay, has turned out to be the world´s largest tit. (That´s actually quite funny. And yes, I´ve mentioned it before on this blog.) The genus Parus has been split into at least five new genera. More annoyingly still, the very species Parus major has been split into at least three new species, while the Blue Tit has been split into five by some over-enthusiastic researchers. The "phylogenetic species concept" is obviously problematic to the bird-watcher, since many of the new "species" can´t be told apart, except by looking at their genes in a laboratory! Brodin seems skeptical of this new wave - are Japanese Great Tits ("Parus minor") really that different from good´ ol Parus major in Europe? 

I´ll end with a fun fact. Well, not really. A Canadian colleague of Brodin had to refer to the Great Tits as "Great Tots" in an e-mail correspondence, the reason being a very strict policy against sexist language at the particular Canadian university were he was residing. It seems wokeness is everywhere! I had the same problem at Amazon.com when I mentioned Great Tits and Blue Tits in a customer review years ago (it took weeks before the review appeared), although I suppose Amazon at the time where simply trying to stop obscene language in general, rather than virtue-signalling. (Their Frank Zappa pages are apparently under constant extra surveillence.) 

But I´m digressing...

"Smartast bland mesar" is recommended lite reading if you´re first language in Swedish, and you have some kind of interest in whatever is flying around your house in Euro-suburbia on early mornings. 

Pseudo-tit

A "review" in which I attempted to school Amazon on the basics of bird systematics...

Ahem, this isn't a Blue Tit. It's not even a tit. It's a, wait for it, Bearded Reedling. Also known as Bearded Tit, some field guides actually refer to this fantastic little songbird as a "pseudo-tit". I wonder what humans would feel like, being referred to as "pseudo-monkeys" by some alien race? Well, kudos to Wild Republic for making such a good likeness of this bird, that I could identify it with the help of an old Heinzel-Fitter-Parslow!

The triumph of the Blackbird

In 1962, the readers of the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter decided that the Blackbird should become “the national bird of Sweden”. Only 5,000 people participated in the vote. This year, the Swedish bird-watchers' association decided to organize a new round of voting on the matter. Or several rounds! In total, 75,000 people participated. Yesterday, local time, the result of the grand finale was announced.

And the winner is…the Blackbird, again!

With 12,914 votes, Turdus merula triumphantly held on to its position. Unserious campaign voting organized by two pods gave the Magpie (!) second position with 9,241 votes. Without the buddy votes, the Magpie wouldn't even be in the finale. The real runner-up is the Blue Tit with 7,286 votes. The tit is blue and yellow, the colors of the Swedish flag. The ostensible super-challenger to the Blackbird, the Bullfinch, only got 3,711 votes and the sixth position.

I voted for, ahem, the Blue Tit in the early rounds and the Bullfinch in the finale.

Blasted.

OK, I suppose I should have known. The Swedish people are just as infatuated with their dusky thrushes as they are with polkagris, surströmming and Försäkringskassan!

Babbling birds and silent fossils

"Handbook of the Birds of the World" (HBW) is a 16-volume mega-encyclopedia and reference work, covering all 9,000 bird species known to science. It took almost 20 years to publish. Interestingly, the publishing house (Lynx Edicions) is based in Spain. The HBW is only available in English, though. Lynx Edicions have also begun to publish a kind of quasi-official sequel to this series, known as "Handbook of the Mammals of the World" (HMW). I suppose their office workers don't have to worry about the Spanish finance crises! Guys, you have guaranteed employment until at least 2020. I'm jealous.

This is volume 12 of the HBW, covering 15 passerine families, the most well known being the Paridae (tits and chickadees). Despite their small size, tits have the reputation for being one of the most intelligent bird groups, after parrots and corvids. Otherwise, this volume contains chapters on birds with funny names like Babblers, Jewel-babblers and Australasian Babblers. Were they really named by bird-lovers, I wonder? The most comic part of the book deals with Pseudopodoces humilis, once assumed to be the smallest corvid in the world, until DNA tests showed that its really the largest parid in the world! Since some people can't tell the difference between a crow and a tit, I wonder what's next? What could a DNA test on the birds in your backyard possibly disclose? Alien genes?

Each volume of the HBW also contains a special chapter about some specific aspect of ornithology. This volume has an extensive section on fossil birds. For those tired of living, babbling birds? Apart from well-known fossil species (Archaeopteryx and so on), we meet the Messelirrisor (a hoopoe from Eocene), Mancalla (an auk from Pliocene), a megapode known simply as the Du, the condor-like Teratornis and the La Brea Condor, which actually was a condor. And countless of others!

Each volume of the HBW is extremely expensive and (I presume) something of a status symbol in the world of bird-watchers and bird-lovers. If I ever get a slush fund on the Cayman Islands, I'll make sure to procure all 16 volumes of this extraordinary work.