Thursday, May 11, 2006
Beauty: Not Just Feather-Deep
Carel Brest van Kempen tagged me with the 10 bird meme. A DC Birding Blog started the meme and is collecting the responses (over 50 so far) here.
As you can see, those are all birders and birdwatchers, real pros. They really know their birds. They picked their choices by beauty and grace, or by special meaning in their lives, or by excitement of having seen them.
But I am, unfortunately, not a birdwatcher. I always wanted to be, but Life interfered. It's never to late to start, though...
I grew up in the grey, dusty city of Belgrade, where there are only sparrows, pigeons and crows. On the trips out in the country, I saw swallows and storks, thrushes and robins, hawks and eagles, owls and seagulls, martins and swifts, but there was never anyone around who could tell me exactly what species it was.
I saw my first raven outside of Tower of London in 1980. Always in love with birds, I got my education from books and TV, as well as my habit of visiting a zoo and a natural history museum wherever I travelled around Europe. When I was a little kid, I thought that the Mandarin Duck was the most beautiful, and was excited by the condor, toucan, flamingo and the Lyre bird.
When I moved to the USA, I finally got to live in a house with a yard, so I put up three bird feeders up. Those attracted House sparrows, House finches, grackles and an occasional nuthatch. They spilled enough seed on the ground to attract starlings, American robins, brown trashers, blue jays and mockingbirds.
Here in North Carolina, one often sees red-tailed hawks and turkey vultures - those two species are so used to humans I sometimes see one on the side of the road, drive up to it, stop and watch it untill a car comes from behind and wants me to move on. I saw barred owls in Cary and spent almost an hour watching a single whooperwill down in Florida. There, I missed seeing a painted bunting by seconds - my lab mate, who is an avid birder, saw it, but I was too slow and blind!
So, how does a non-birder pick ten most beautiful birds? I don't know. So I asked my wife and my daugher (my son was in a homework frenzy at the time). So, here are their picks. Mrs.Coturnix chose these ten, often indicating a whole family in the absence of knowledge about particular species: hummingbird, eagle, owl, zebra finch, parrot, flamingo, pelican, swan, falcon and roadrunner.
Coturnietta is more sophisticated. She knew her #1 right off the bat. Then, she went to her room and picked up her Sibley and her Peterson and started leafing through them to pick the remaining nine. Here, at her age of 9, is her top ten list: snowy egret, great egret, wild duck, cardinal, bluebird, great horned owl, rufous humminbird, red-headed woodpecker, American robin and golden-cheeked warbler.
OK, so I am a biologist. I should know a little about birds myself, although I never took any ornithology classes. My criterion for "beautiful" may be a little different from a birdwatcher's. For me, beautiful is "cool", as in unique, unusual and "oh, how I wish I could study this species" sense.
I was always excited by biological oddities. So many birds are little brown ones, looking like a sparrow. So many others look just like a duck. Others are just like parrots. Starting with some dinosaurian ancestor, evolution produced many species of birds and so many of them are so similar to each other. But biological curiosities are not just cool because they are unusual. They are also cool because they demonstrate how far can evolution go, what extremes can it reach, can it produce real novelty or just tinker with what's already there. There is so much we can learn about evolution by studying the unusual species, their anatomy, biochemistry, development, physiology, reproductive strategies and behavior.
And no, despite my Internet handle, the Coturnix quail did not make the list. I guess after all these years I am a little blase about it - my heart does not race with excitement every time I see one any more. Though, I still believe it is the best avian model for laboratory and field studies, not just in my field of chronobiology, but also in physiology and behavior, including the mystery of avian olfaction - it has a proportionally (in comparison to the brain size) largest olfactory bulb of all birds except the turkey vulture. So, here are my top ten:
1. The Beautiful Mind - Clark's nutcracker (Nucifraga columbiana)

Made for Each Other : A Symbiosis of Birds and Pines
2. The Bat Wanna-be: Oil-bird (Steatornis caripensis)

3. Big Bird: Ostrich (Struthio camelus)



4. The Snake-Handler: Secretary Bird (Sagittarius Serpentarius)

5. Modern Pteranodon: Hoatzin (Opisthocomus hoazin)

6. Brilliant At Breakfast - Raven (Corvus corax)

7. Furball - Great Spotted Kiwi (Apteryx haastii)

8. The Mystery of the Laughing Shadow - Common Mynah (Acridotheres tristis)

9. To see the world: Arctic tern (Sterna paradisaea)

10. Baudelaire and the nose: Wandering Albatross (Diomedea exulans)

And this is the list. This leaves out so many other cool birds: the bower bird, scrub jay, African Grey parrot, bobolink, peacock, Arctic Ptarmigan, cassowary, all the penguins and hummingbirds, and many, many others (that is for the Top 20 meme...).
I am supposed to tag some other people to do this meme as well. It appears that all the birding blogs have already tagged each other. But, hey, what happened to Grrrlscientist? Is it possible she did not get tagged? If not, she is my first choice. And I can't believe nobody tagged PZ!?
I see some tagged two people, some three, some one, some none. To spread the meme outside the circle of birdwatching blogs, I'd like to tag quite a few people, some scientists, some not, so if two of them actually do it, I'll be happy. Here they are: Darren Naish, The Lancelet, Sahotra Sarkar, Newton's Binomium, Archy and Lindsay. Perhaps one of them will take a different approach altogether - maybe a list of ten coolest extinct birds, from Archeopteryx, through Epyornis, Moa and Dodo, to Passenger Pigeon and Carolina Parakeet. Wait and see - I'll link to their lists if and when they get posted.