Academic who found out why it’s smart to be a birdbrain

One day, as he sat in his hide observing the birds, he saw how one stood up off its egg and started to make its loud greeting call. Birkhead was surprised because the call was only normally made when partners met at a nest site, and this bird was alone.

Looking out to sea and he glimpsed among the masses of guillemots, puffins and razorbills that one guillemot was heading towards the cliffs. To his amazement it landed a few seconds later next to the bird who was calling, and the two then engaged in a greeting ritual of calling and clashing beaks.

“My incubating bird must have recognised its partner hundreds of metres away by sight. It made me realise that the way birds perceive the world must be much more sophisticated than we gave them credit for.”

A few decades later, the professor’s fascination with the sensory mysteries of birds is still passionate. In between lectures and training research students, his travels have taken him to all points of the globe to study wildy differing species. His experience has told him that we underestimate the senses of birds. His latest book Bird Sense is the first to investigate how birds interpret the world and the way their behaviour is shaped by their senses. It is his fourth book aimed at a popular audience.

It tells amazing stories of brought new respect for birds – from the way the great grey owl hunts using its hearing to pinpoint where mice and voles lurk beneath snow to how the kiwi has given up on vision and operates in the world mostly led by the senses of smell and touch, its long sensitive bill and highly developed nostrils detecting earthworms buried deep in the mud. The sense of vision of most birds, though, is far better than the human eye; they can also discriminate many more colours and see ultraviolet – so blue tits, for instance, recognise each other and assess each other as mates by looking at how ultraviolet is reflected on the top of another tit’s head.

The discovery of how bird’s eyes see more colours was made by studying the structure of the organ and comparing it to other animals. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) has meant that much more is now known about how different areas of the animal’s brain light up when stimulated by sights, smells, sounds – or its mate. Among some of the mind-boggling research methods described is the use of frosted contact lenses put on a robins’ eyes to help researchers to figure out how they use the earth’s magnetic field to orientate themselves.

Scientific breakthroughs such as improved scanning techniques and DNA fingerprinting have helped people like Prof Birkhead to understand birds, but has scientists’ increasing knowledge of bird behaviour helped other areas of research?

“It’s rather a short-sighted government policy that says all scientific research on animals has to have value for humans, but breakthroughs in the understanding of, for instance, human neuro-biology have been made thanks to studies of birds. Work on canaries showed that, unlike humans, birds’ neurones regenerate every year.

“If we can pinpoint the genetic trick which makes the regeneration happen in birds, then possibly in the future gene therapy may make it happen in humans, with huge potential implications for a range of illnesses.”

The most knotty question regarding birds’ senses is whether they experience emotion. This is the most enigmatic area Birkhead touches on, although he clearly believes that birds are not automata and describes how he observed a Brent goose standing beside the corpse of its mate, still keeping its vigil a week later.

“We may never know what birds ‘feel’ and only have the benchmark of our own experience of emotion to measure them by – which may not be very helpful.”

Bird Sense, What It’s Like To Be A Bird by Tim Birkhead is published by Bloomsbury, £16.99. To order from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop call 0800 0153232 or go to www.yorkshirepostbookshop.co.uk Postage costs £2.95.