Laura Erickson's For the Birds

At the end of 2022, a science writer named David Bjerklie, a writer for LIFE magazine, asked me several questions about avian intelligence via email and phone for an article he was writing for a special edition. In February 2023, David sent me his manuscript, I heard from a fact checker at LIFE, and that was that. In the intervening two years, all this slipped my mind, but last Saturday my dear friend Susan Eaton was given a copy, titled Birds: The World’s Most Remarkable Creatures. The article she read about bird intelligence started out like this:

“What was going on in that raven’s mind?” It’s a question that still intrigues Laura Erickson four decades after her encounter with the bird. Erickson, who has written more than a dozen books on birds and won a slew of awards from ornithology societies and birding associations, was on a long walk along a quiet country road. On the same path the day before, her wristwatch, a treasured gift from her husband, had slipped off, and she feared it had been lost forever. But now, a few miles into her walk, she heard a raven squawking. “A few minutes later, the raven flew over with something hanging out of its beak,” Erickson says. “I pulled up my binoculars, and there was my wristwatch! The raven flew in closer and closer, right over my head. And voilà! It dropped my wristwatch at my feet.” As Erickson, who hosts the long-running radio program For the Birds later recounted, “I’m still gobsmacked. I’ve spent the intervening years studying everything I could about avian intelligence, but the more I learn, the more I realize that I haven’t even scratched the surface.”

Hokey smoke! That of course has been one of my favorite stories ever since it happened in 1981. I’ve talked and written about it many times, but when Susan sent me a photo of that paragraph, in LIFE of all places, I was thrilled.

Russ had to run out to the mall area yesterday, so on the way home he stopped at Barnes and Noble to pick up a copy. He ended up with two because the issue was printed with two different covers, and of course I immediately read David Bjerklie’s entire 12-page article. He quoted many important and famous researchers and educators around the world, including Jennifer Ackerman (my favorite nature writer) and Irene Pepperberg, whose work with Alex the African Gray Parrot gave us more insights into the mental acuity of a highly intelligent bird than many close-minded ornithologists were ready to reckon with when Pepperberg started publishing her results.

Amazingly, Bjerklie quotes me in two other places, too. He wrote that the authors of the book Gifts of the Crow, John Marzluff and Tony Angell, “suggest that corvids share seven unique capacities with humans: language, delinquency, frolic, passion, wrath, risk-taking, and awareness,” and continued:

Not everyone agrees with Marzluff and Angell, but certainly no one disputes that smart birds and smart primates both possess curiosity. “When I was a teacher,” Laura Erickson recalls, “I always had a bell on my desk. It was from a board game, and it had a button on top. At the end of the school year, I would bring this bright-orange bell home and ring it in front of a blue jay I was raising. So he looks at the bell, his crest goes up, he jumps, and he flicks his wings and cocks his head. I ring it again, and he immediately goes up and pushes the button with his bill. But it doesn’t make the cool ‘Ding!’ because his breast was pressed against the bell. He looks at me, and I ring it again. I leave and go to another room. All of a sudden, I hear this ding! Ding, ding, ding, ding! And so I come running, and he is hovering over the bell so he can press the button without his body touching it. Now what, in evolutionary terms, could possibly be of value in ringing a bell?”

The short answer: There is none. But as Erickson points out, “curiosity, tenaciousness, figuring out cause and effect, and keen observational skills are excellent qualities for an opportunistic omnivore, be it a blue jay or a human being.” It is that kind of intelligence, she adds, “that gets my husband doing the New York Times crossword puzzle every morning.”

Imagine my thrill at being quoted in the very same paragraph as Tony Angell, whose ethereal Ravens, Crows, Magpies, and Jays has held a treasured place on my bookshelves since it was first published in 1978, and whose art has graced 30 of the annual “Birds in Art” exhibits at the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Museum in Wausau since 1985—he was the Master Wildlife Artist featured in 2001. Tony Angell!

The last topic Bjerklie covers in depth is birdsong. When he gets to mimicry, he lists a big variety of sounds various mimicking birds have imitated, and then writes:

Birdsong can also serve as a travelogue, says Erickson. “When you hear a mockingbird, you can tell where he’s been by the songs in his repertoire,” she says. “I call them the Othello bird because Othello attracted Desdemona by telling her tales of his adventures, and that’s sort of what a mockingbird or brown thrasher or catbird is doing when they throw in those imitations: “Look! I encountered a chainsaw! Listen, I once faced off with a cell phone!”

I was thrilled to be interviewed for this project in the first place, but somehow forgetting all about it in the intervening two years made seeing the article in print thrilling all over again. And like a mockingbird, I can’t help but shout about it from the treetops.