Some Notes on the Psychology of Birds
By C. WILLIAM BEEBE
Curator of Birds, New York Zoölogical Society
(Reprinted by permissinn from the Seventh Annual Report of the New York Zoölogical Society)
EVEN a superficial study of the psychology of birds compels us to attribute to them a highly developed intellectual and emotional life
A few examples may make this more patent, and will mention only those which entail rather complex psychic processes. Birds have remarkable memories. It is said a Pigeon will remember a person after many months, and a Bullfinch has been known to recognize a voice after a year's time. Birds often dream, and frequently sing or chatter in their sleep. There are few species of birds which do not show the emotions of love and sympathy, and, what is a very rare trait among animals, that sincerity of affection which causes many birds to mate for life. Even in those species which pair for only a year, one of the two will sometimes pine and die with grief at the loss of its mate.
Indeed, sympathy is the key-note in the growth of the higher intellectual and social qualities which find their culmination in man, and Professor Shaler is right when he attributes to birds a higher development of this emotion than to any other creatures below man. Reptiles can be trained to know their keeper, and an alligator will defend her buried eggs; dogs are unusually affectionate animals, and the higher monkeys have many sympathetic habits and emotions, but birds lead them all. This is not remarkable when we consider the wonderfully important place which the family holds in this class of vertebrates. The building of the nest, the comparatively long incubation of the eggs, and the patient feeding and complex education of the young birds all are duties in which both parents often share. It is this continued association, this "bridging over of generations," which has made sympathy so prominent a factor in the minds of birds. In what other class of animals are vocal signals of fear, distress, or terror so widely understood, or so willingly met with efforts of assistance?
To me it seems puerile to try to believe that a bird's affection for her young, so great that she will often give her life in their defense, can be correlated with an instinct, using that word in the common acceptance of the term. It is no more an instinct in the sense of an uncontrollable emotion, than is the analogous action of an heroic human being. Altruism, pure and simple, has governed the action of more than one bird under my observation during the past year, and that, too, in some instances, between birds of different species. Three instances come to mind: a female Red-winged Blackbird which carried a mouthful of worms to a nestful of young Red-wings near by, before passing on to brood her
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