Whippoorwill Wrangle

As I sat in the outdoor tub recently, I heard two whippoorwills who seemed to be vying with each other—at least that's how it sounded to me. Conversations and competitions between animals can get quite complex. We humans—with our complex languages and our big brains—tend to belittle the forms of communication we hear going on in the animal world. Caught within the narrow confines of our own kind of information transfer, we are apt to look upon animal communication as primitive and simplistic. We miss the subtle details of how they talk to each other.

So I sat there in the tub, tuning into the dialog that these two birds seemed to be having with each other. The whippoorwill's call is an onomatopoeic one—meaning that their song is essentially identical to their name. These birds sing out—not with the usual “tweet tweet”—but with a robust “WHIP-poor-WILL.” The first two syllables seem to be emitted on the inhale of breath, with the last strong syllable exhaled with gusto. Because the bird calls out on both inhale and exhale, he can go on and on, uninterrupted. And sometimes whippoorwills do—much to my chagrin. They can repeatedly call out through the night, drilling their calls deeply into one's ear and brain.

The two birds I was listening to this night would each sequentially sing out a dozen or so phrases and then fall silent, as if waiting and listening to the other bird, to see what the response was. They called back and forth several times, before they both paused for a while, as the forest silence once again returned. In a few minutes their call-and-response routine would begin afresh—with now one of them having shifted to a new location in the forest.

There obviously was some kind of communication going on. I became absorbed in their game—trying to fathom what the rules were. It was rather like traveling to a foreign country, where I was ignorant of both the language and customs, and was observing a dialog between people and trying to guess what they were talking about.

Was I listening to a whippoorwill contest? If so, were they contesting territory? This late in the season, they were unlikely to be seeking mates—the broods of all of our local birds had already been fledged, so there was no need to vie for a mate. Well, maybe they weren't competing for territory; maybe it was simply to see which one had the more appealing and accomplished call. Or maybe they were discussing some aspect of forest life... such as the lack of mosquitoes to eat tonight.

So, if it was a territorial contest, I wondered which bird might be the challenger and which one the defender. One bird's pitch was a little lower than the other's. Does pitch convey information? Does the more aggressive bird sing at a lower pitch? I also tried to guess which bird's call seemed to be more eloquent than the other. Would the challenger or the defender sound more impressive and resolute? I know that birds often try to bluff each other, and maybe a kind of deceit was going on.

When, after a pause, one changed position, I tried to guess if he was yielding and backing off, or maybe losing interest in the game and simply moving on. On the other hand, birds will sometimes alter the quality of their call—in order to signal that they are possibly acquiescing, when actually they seek to deceive the other into believing they are closer and more intimidating that they really are. It's part of the game.

As in most cases when I am treated to the calls and exhibitions of our wildlife, I am left wondering—with more questions than answers. Their sophisticated communication is yet beyond my comprehension. I've reposed in the tub for a couple of decades now, eavesdropping on their conversations. Bit by bit, I sometimes begin to understand what they are up to. Maybe in another half century—when I am a hundredtwentysomething—I may get it.

Dog Deliberations

It's only been fairly recently that we humans have been inclined to allow animals to have minds or even thoughts. Rene Descartes influenced the beliefs of people for several hundred years, when he maintained that animals cannot think and have no emotions. That insidious idea encouraged hundreds of years of mistreatment and even torture of animals, due to the rationalization that they cannot feel pain or even have the ability to ponder what was happening to them. Like a machine, it was believed that an animal was simply without awareness and automatically reacted to events. You can disassemble a machine without causing it pain, so why not a dumb animal?

Fortunately we now have awakened to the fact that animals do have thoughts, have emotions, and are able to learn new things. That latter factor means they even have culture! This knowledge has led to much more humane treatment of animals—although we still have a long way to go, to improve our behavior towards them.

In fact, recent fascinating research at two universities (the University of Cincinnati in Ohio and the University of Canterbury in New Zealand) have demonstrated that even spiders have the ability to think. The researchers have clearly demonstrated that spiders have a memory, use sophisticated ways of communicating, and make complex decisions. Spiders deliberate!

The animal with whom I have the closest relationship is our dog Chompsky. (Yes, he is named after Noam Chomsky.) He's the most intelligent dog I've ever known. He understands and responds to a few dozen words. He knows the daily routine—often anticipating what's coming next, by either the time of day or by various emotional or body signals that we send. It's as if he is reading our minds, but I know it's more a matter of his acute attention to subtle cues that we display.

Chompsky has an excellent memory, which is definitely an indication of a mind. For example, when we walk through the woods he will adhere to fading trails that we've not followed for several weeks, so there can't be any trace of lingering scent that his exquisite nose could pick up. He simply remembers the way, as he leads me along. When he comes to a branch in the fading path, he pauses and looks back at me to see which direction I might choose today.

A dog does not have the ability for language, so Chompsky cannot cogitate in words, as we humans do; but there has to be some kind of mental process going on—wherein he thinks about things, remembers prior events in order to make today's choices, weighs alternative possibilities before making choices, and even anticipates future events. He deliberates!

One unique feature that dogs possess (and most animals don't) is the ability to communicate and interact extremely well with humans. That skill is what transformed wolves into human companions, tens of thousands of years ago. Those first proto-canines were smart enough to realize that pairing up with people had several advantages—such as bringing a plentiful food supply and a cozy lifestyle, as a companion to the planet's smartest critter.

One of Chompsky's more fetching qualities is his propensity to lock eyes with me and hold our gaze for several minutes. He even seems to be making a mind-meld, as if some kind of deep, wordless bond has been established between us. The other night I walked past his bed, as his eyes focused intently on me. I felt compelled to sit down, place my hands on him, and gaze deeply into his eyes.

I pondered what may be going on in his mind. Was he feeling the same emotion—call it love—that I was? I sat there, as if my mind was melding with his. I had sweet, mushy thoughts come to me, that I sent to him. I wondered if he was having the same warm musings I was. Just as I thought maybe we were on the threshold of a cross-species breakthrough that would dazzle the scientific and spiritual world, he abruptly got up and walked away! So much for a new discovery.

Bat Speak

The nature of animal communication has been of interest to humans for ages. We do know that they communicate with each other. We watch them and observe the sounds and gestures they use and wonder how they speak to each other. How much information are they able to exchange, and how complex might it be? We assume that human communication is far more intricate, since we have a much greater cognitive ability and we have developed countless words that we string together in endless ways. But are we really that much more loquacious?

The biggest barrier to understanding animal communication is the fact that we cannot get inside their minds to figure out what's going on. The so-called “theory of mind” that allows one human to guess fairly well what's going on inside the head of another human is helpful, because every human brain works pretty much the same. But how does the mind of an animal operate? What goes on inside the head of beavers or elephants, when they send messages to each other?

In Stephan Budiansky's 1998 book If a Lion Could Talk, he says that we humans simply can't get inside the mind of an animal because (1) they communicate with each other in a wordless manner and (2) our anthropomorphic attitude gets in the way: we can't help but attribute human characteristics to what they're doing. When we do this, we miss who they really are. It causes us to view animals as some sort of defective version of what a human is. We completely miss their special kind of intelligence. So if a lion could talk, we'd totally not understand what it said.

Rene Descartes didn't help cross-species communication, because he believed that animals were more like machines than conscious beings. He thought that they have no feelings or emotions. Descartes paved the way for 20^th century cognitive scientists, who thought that, although animals might be more conscious than a machine, they still insisted in seeing animal consciousness as a lame version of ours.

These limitations we've had regarding animal communication are finally beginning to be cast off. In 1974 the philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote a seminal paper titled “What Is it Like to Be a Bat?” he took issue with the then-current view of animal consciousness and claimed that bat communication is quite sophisticated; that in fact bats' echolocation is similar to human vision and contains lots of information. But since consciousness is a very subjective phenomenon, we humans will never be able to experience the world the way a bat does. Nagel maintained that each critter knows only what it's like to be themselves. We will never be able to know what it's like to be a bat—even if we could decipher their language. Even if a bat could talk, we'd not understand what it said.

A recent fascinating forward step in the process of learning how animals communicate was taken by researchers at the Bat Lab for NeuroEcology at Tel Aviv University, who showed that bats not only do a very good job of communicating, but that they jabber among themselves quite a bit. The scientists recorded the vocalizations of Egyptian fruit bats and then analyzed the sounds. What initially sounded like a meaningless cacophony was really an abundance of “bat speak.” They were even able to identify individual bat voices and learn, to a limited extent, what the messages were. They found that bats bicker a lot—they quibble over food, space, where to sleep, and with whom to have sex... just like humans! Bat communication is indeed much more sophisticated that we thought.

So the evidence mounts. Animals do communicate, and if we can drop our anthropomorphic bias, we are beginning to learn how well they do it. Many indigenous peoples have long known that animals are articulate—that they possess sophisticated nonverbal skills. Animals employ subtle ways of sending messages that don't require all the verbiage we humans seem to need. While we fire off long strings of words at each other—often without listening—animals use different but effective ways of getting their messages across. Maybe if we shut up and honed our listening and observational skills, we could learn a thing or two about communication from them.