Mad skills soar in the skies
The hardest part about attending the Flathead Audubon Society meeting turned out to be finding it. I parked at one end of the Gateway Community Center and started trying doors. I was already along two sides of the building when I saw a harried woman doing the same.
“Are you going to the meeting?” I asked.
“Yeah, I’ll be so mad if I miss it.” All those doors were locked, too. “Get in and let’s drive around to the other side,” she said, rushing to clear items off her passenger seat.
We kept peering and then saw a dim light on the opposite side of the building.
“Over there!” we said, finally spotting a low-hung Audubon Society banner. We were late, but we made it.
The featured speaker, Denny Olson, serves as the conservation educator for the chapter. The position caps a 50-year career of wildlife study, research, authorship and presentations. It’s this last that tonight drew a crowd beyond the usual flock of birdwatchers.
Olson, who moved to Kalispell after collecting degrees in Minnesota and working as a “traveling troubadour naturalist” countrywide, connects the natural world to our human understanding, reveling equally in mystery and explanation.
“Being called a bird brain — I always view it as a compliment,” he said, although he admits that “birds have a different kind of ‘smart’ than we do.”
For starters, he detailed the relative weight of the brain to the size of the creature. A T. rex, about as old as birds are as a species, had a brain that was 1/31,000th of its weight. A human’s brain is about 1/46th. But a rufous hummingbird’s brain is 1/24th, relatively about twice as heavy as a human’s.
The farther north they live and the higher in elevation, the bigger certain birds’ brains are — but don’t let that go to your Homo sapiens head.
By “smart” Olson referred to capacities for fun and play. Ptarmigans run up hills just to slide down, an avian version of skinning the Fish. Ravens engage in snowball fights; Olson has seen one fly upside down for a quarter mile to entertain its friends as if saying, “‘Hold my beer and watch this.’”
Smaller synapses in birds’ brains mean they can think five times faster than humans, which might explain how chickadees and gray jays can cache thousands of pieces of food and remember exactly where.
It’s not just memory, play and speed at work in those brains. Olson also talked about how birds perform advanced calculations in flying (peregrine falcon), both optical (American dipper) and auditory (owl) trigonometry, mimicry (lazuli bunting, catbird, black-headed grosbeak), toolmaking and problem solving (Caledonian crow), and GPS and energy efficiency (black swift, blackpoll warbler).
We could have used a warbler to find this meeting, and a chickadee would have remembered where I parked my car, which I managed to walk past on my way out.
Like Olson, next time someone calls me a dodo or a silly goose, I’ll thank them.
Audience development director Margaret Davis can be reached at 406-758-4436 or mdavis@dailyinterlake.com.