Into the Minds of Birds

摘要

Bird 7, an american crow black of feather, beak, and eye, stood unmoving behind the bars of the cage, his right eye fixed on me. Outside the bars, with a mask covering my face, I sat unmoving, looking back at him. In my outstretched hands lay the corpse of a dead crow. For a full minute, Bird 7 stared at me and the cadaver. In the wild with his fellows, he likely would have also cawed, scolded, and mobbed me, perceiving me as a threat because of my association with a dead crow. As a lone captive, he merely studied my masked face. "Focus on one of his eyes and count the number of times he blinks," John Marzluff, the wildlife biologist behind this experiment at the University of Washington, Seattle, had instructed me. Blinks are a simple measure of a bird's nervousness, and in that minute, I counted 29. Relaxed birds average 36 blinks per minute, a statistically significant difference. Looking at me made Bird 7 nervous.