Several months ago I read about Australian biologist Tim Low's book Where Song Began, and after a fair bit of frustration with the library yesterday finally got my hands on a copy. I'd say it's the most interesting non-fiction book I've read in several years. Though I already knew most of what he writes about taxonomy and biogeography, I only really started reading about these subjects in the past ten years and so it's interesting to see how those fields got to their current state. The things I take for granted now (like that the ancestors of keas and moas flew to New Zealand) were not even being considered when I was a kid. His discussion of Australian ecology is almost entirely new to me, and particularly fascinating for his dicussion of sugar in the Australian ecosystem. I read The Future Eaters some time ago, but in his chapter on fire he demostrates in detail why Flannery's model is overly simplistic (though The Future Eaters is still an interesting book). Birds also have much more of an impact on whole ecosystems than I'd given them credit for; I'd always figured that their pollination services were secondary to those of insects and their seed dispersal was mostly local. Perhaps the most exciting thing to me is the suggestion that intelligence is an ancestral feature of the clade which includes parrots and perching birds, based on its presence in all branches of parrots and many of the lower branches of songbirds (though it doesn't seem to be present in New Zealand wrens and suboscines.) I've been fascinated by Australian magpies and apostlebirds (especially apostlebirds) ever since I saw them, and this book confirms that they are, in fact, interesting birds. He mentions a study by Diamond and Bond who did an analysis of play in birds, and Australian magpies, apostlebirds, and keas are the only species in their study which engage in all four forms they looked at. Of course now I'm even more annoyed that keas are rare in American zoos and magpies and apostlebirds (and lyrebirds, and white-winged choughs, and New Caledonian crows) seem to be entirely absent.
Second the motion on this book - it should be on the bookshelf of anyone interested in birds, ecology or conservation. We do have keas at Bristol and they love to play - our have a stream in their enclosure and I have several times seen them playing by dropping sticks in it and following them down the stream, then fishing them out to fly back to the start. Balls to push around are also popular. I expect corvids everywhere are of pretty comparable high intelligence, especially the larger ones. From what I have read Ravens rank with larger parrots and even great apes in problem-solving skills.
