Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Ask A Zookeeper your questions!
This is where we turn to Instagram and Youtube and find out what you want to know about birds.
We're going to start out with a question from 6_rlq here, writing in on Youtube.
[What's] responsible to color the eyes of birds?
Well, the simple answer is genetics.
Every bird has a genetic program in it that tells it what pigments to produce, for the
eys or for any other part of its body.
But in this case, there's a few different answers to what the specific pigment will
be.
If the eye is brown or black (this is true in humans, by the way) the pigment is melanin.
Melanin is the same color that makes hair dark, it's the color that makes brown eyes
brown, it's the color that makes very brown eyes look almost black.
If the eye is red, yellow, or orange, those are all carotenoid pigments.
Those are derived from plants.
The bird can't produce those pigments directly, but it gets it from the food that it eats.
If the eye is blue, beautiful to see, but the eye is actually structual color.
It's based on the shape of proteins in the animal's eye.
This is true in humans too!
If you have blue eyes, that is not actually a blue pigmented eye.
There's little proteins in there that reflect blue light, but it's the shape of the protein
that gives it its color.
We talked about this in a video about blue feathers because it's also true in feathers.
Blue is almost universally a structural color in vertebrates - birds, mammals, reptiles,
and fish.
So that's what's responsible to color the eyes of birds!
Thanks for writing in!
Next we turn to Instagram.
Adventure Ed writes in.
Adventure Ed has a Youtube channel and Instagram page where he does beautiful things with nature
videography, so you can go check that out.
But Adventure Ed writes in, "What is the smartest bird?"
This is a really difficult question to answer, Adventure Ed!
Because comparing intelligence between different species is very difficult.
I like to use the example of a woodpecker scientist.
Woodpeckers are geniuses!
They hide acorns for the winter and they can remember up to 10,000 different locations
for acorns they've hidden.
That's an incredible feat of memory.
But let's say there's a woodpecker scientist, and this woodpecker scientist is wearing a
labcoat, maybe some glasses, holding a clipboard, holding a pen, and taking notes.
And testing me on my intelligence.
The woodpecker scientist measures intelligence by how many acorns I can hide and then remember
where they are.
And let's say I can do like 200 or 300.
I think that'd be pretty good.
But the woodpecker is going to be like, "Hmm...
I thought humans were smart, but they can hardly remember where they put acorns!"
So it's measuring intelligence on an axis that I am not good at, even though (hopefully)
I am an intelligent human.
But the woodpecker wouldn't be able to test that using that particular test.
Anyway, all of that is to say that we tend to measure animal intelligence on axes that
wer're really good at, so whether they can communicate, whether they can solve novel
problems they have never seen before, whether they can solve them very quickly, whether
they can use tools as they solve problems.
All of those are things that humans are really good at, so that's how we measure intelligence.
So, with all that said, the smartest types of birds (based on the way that we measure
intelligence) are corvids - crows, ravens, magpies, related species in that group.
The New Caledonian Crows can create tools from scratch in order to help them solve problems
that they've never seen before.
They're just REALLY intelligent.
The other class of birds that are very smart are the parrots.
They're very good at communication and they're very social and they can do observational
learning.
So one parrot can learn how to do a behavior or how to avoid a predator or where to find
food by observing another parrot.
It's a very useful skill and a great measure of intelligence as far as we're concerned.
So corvids, parrots.
Thanks for writing in Adventure Ed!
Also on Instagram, jamunns4 writes in, "Do you know anything about Green Cheek Conures/Parakeets?"
I help take care of a flock of them, so yeah.
"If yes, is there a way to know how old one is?"
The short answer is no, you can't tell how old one is just by looking at it.
Parrots are not at the top of the food chain and they're hunted by eagles.
Eagles will preferentially hunt for young, old, sick, or injured birds.
So parrots are very good at hiding all four of those things.
They reach their adult size before they turn one year old for most species.
They grow from an egg size to a full grown parrot in one year.
They almost do nothing else during that time.
They learn a lot, but they also just grow.
Then they stay that adult size, exactly the same for the rest of their lives.
You can't even tell behaviorally by just looking at a parrot if it is an old bird or not because
they maintain the same energy level throughout their lives.
As far as I know, the only way to tell how old a parrot is is to look at its bones, and
obviously, you can't do that while it's alive, so you can only figure out after it has lived
its life.
Our final question comes to us from Mary Rose Kent, who writes in a very nice comment on
Youtube.
"I read somewhere recently (I’m sorry, but my brain is draining away, so I no longer
know where) that parrots are to birds what humans are to various ape species—related
but working in a whole different sphere.
I believe that the fact that they have a sense of rhythm and respond to people music is distinctly
a part of this.
There’s someone somewhere in Mezo America or South America who’s working to decode
parrot language who has figured out that the first thing they “say” is the same among
all the birds of that species (or at least in the group he’s studying), and then the
next thing is always different, which he correlates to “Hello” and then their name.
I don’t know if he’s gotten any further along on this because I’ve totally lost
track of where I read about this.﻿" Mary Rose, I couldn't dig up that particular
study, but I did find some interesting information about parrot language.
This was kind of a two-part question.
It's, "How are parrots different mentally from other birds?" and then also, "What do
we know about parrot language?"
I found a lot more about parrot language, probably because it's easier to quantify.
The first study I found is right here.
That one says, basically, that parrots use contact calls as they're talking to each other
and forming a flock.
Parrots will copy a contact call from another parrot and that's the way of communicating
to an individual within the flock, is copying them.
The way they tested this was by putting two parrots in an enclosure together, then playing
a contact call that was similar to one or the other and measuring their response times.
The one that had a call similar to the one being played was faster to respond and responded
more strongly.
That indicated that it was responding to some kind of communication perceived from the researchers'
playback.
The second study I found was looking at parrot dialects.
This is super interesting!
They were looking at different parrot species and whether they "speak" differently - make
different sounds in different geographical areas.
They found that in 90 PERCENT of parrot species that this is a thing, that they use different
sounds in different areas.
If you've ever seen a parrot being able to copy sounds, this is the use for that behavior
in their natural environment.
When a parrot flies into a flock and learns the sounds of the local area, it learns how
to fit in.
That can help it join that flock.
The ability for them to learn sounds from dogs, cats, people, car alarms, or whatever,
all of that is based on their ability to learn the dialect as they move to a new area.
I'm going to put both of those links in the description below so you can learn more about
those two studies.
If you know about this particular study, the Meso-America saying hello kind of thing, be
sure to link that to me, because I'm very interested to learn more about parrot language.
Also, if you have any information about the first question, which is "How are parrots
mentally different than other birds?" in their response to music, or in their sense of rhythm,
or anything like that, please write in with any information that you have because I couldn't
find enough to answer the question satisfactorily.
That wraps up this edition of Ask A Zookeeper.
If you have any questions, be sure to write those questions in the comments below.
I'm happy to look up any information that you might need, or do some research alongside
you.
Also you can subscribe to know when your questions are answered!
Thanks for stopping by this week to learn what makes Life awesome!