Animal Behavior

I tell people all the time that (besides Human Sexuality) the best class I ever took in college was Animal Behavior.

It's absolutely amazing to me how animals adapt to whatever environment or niche they occupy. The class I took also had a lab section. We learned about all different kinds of experiments that exploited certain aspects of animal behavior as well as conducting a few of our own. On one of these outings, our class ventured out into the one of the quad areas of UW. First, our instructor handed us all a handful of peanuts. Our task was to break some of the nuts open, while leaving others intact, and scatter them about the quad then wait to see what squirrels would do with them. After a short period of time, it became obvious that squirrels would eat the broken open nuts at the spot where the nut was found, but with intact peanuts, the squirrels would carry the nut 20-30 feet away and bury it. Why? Because squirrels have learned over time that nuts are perishable. That's why they eat the open nuts on the spot, and bury the intact nuts to use later.

Another experiment we conducted involved crows. Our instructor played a tape recording of several crow calls and explained each call as the experiment unfolded. The first recording was a call that supposedly summonsed crows to an area for food (as an example). I never knew crows were a communal bird, but before long, no less than a dozen crows showed up in the canopy of trees surrounding us. Oddly enough, there seemed to be a few more squirrels than usual as well. Many of them flew to ground level, and started gathering some of the nuts we had been tossing around. The next call, was the sound of a crow being murdered (literally, no pun intended). The crows in the canopy stood silent while the crows on the ground took shelter in the trees. The squirrels on the ground stood still as well. The next call was a distress call, and all the crows scattered. Interestingly enough, so did the squirrels. As it turns out, crows have a fairly sophisticated method of communicating over large distances, and squirrels, via evolution, have learned to understand the calls of the crows.

Totally fascinating to me. I have never forgotten this class because of this experiment.

The other day, Stephanie and I were taking our daily walk through the neighborhood, enjoying the brisk fall air and changing trees, when the most splendid thing happened. We were walking under a couple of walnut trees. Some of the nuts were falling from the sky, seeming a little too close for comfort. Looking up in the air, it was obvious that a murder of crows was trying feast on the nuts in the tree. There were crows in the trees, on telephone wires, or any place else they could carry a nut to. They were dropping the nuts from the sky to try to break them open so the nut inside could be easily retrieved. At first, I thought they might be trying to protect the area and were trying to bombard us with the nuts in a quite cartoon-like fashion. Really, they were not after us afterall, just lunch.

We went about our walk, in pretty much the usual fashion... picking up aluminum cans to save the planet and pay for Harvard Medical School, meanwhile observing that the walk seems shorter and shorter each time we walk it, just like we always do. I realized this time, however, that we are all creatures of habit and we are merely one of a series of species that is well-adapted to our environment. As humans, we may be more complicated in our abilities, thought processes, opposable thumbs... or whatever sets us apart from the monkeys or dolphins or crows, but when you get right down to it, we're all just animals trying to survive in our habitats, making the best use of tools and resources we have available to us so that we can propagate for another cycle or eat for another day.

Thank god we're on the end of the continuum that figured out how to grow, grind and drink coffee from beans and drive fancy hybrid cars, and not from the end that has to drop nuts from trees to get lunch. Evolution Rules!