Squirrels listen in to birds' conversations as signal of safety | Hacker News Reader

Squirrels listen in to birds' conversations as signal of safety

phys.org

143 pointslelf41 comments

We have chickens, and they do the same thing. They listen for cues from other species, and rightly so. We have an adopted (just showed up one day) guinea hen who has a jungle type squawk she makes whenever a predator, including a local sharp-shinned hawk is present. When she pipes up, everyone takes cover. Ironically, when she makes the noise, our barn cats look to start hunting/ crouching. They are fantastic predators.

I suspect the most distracted, hormonally frenzied squirrel is more aware of his environment and present in his moment than the majority of humans can achieve with concentrated effort.

Go sit in a forest clearing and be still and quiet long enough for everything to decide you're staying and work around you. That place on that day will have a story of more detail, drama and character than any soap opera could hope to get. Tomorrow there'll be another epic there. The next clearing over has a different show.

Isn't that just by nature of the fact that the squirrel lives in an environment in which he has to actively search for food when he's hungry and one that has other entities actively trying to kill it?

This is correct. When I'm riding my bike it's easy to stay in the moment. I have to be alert for busted infrastructure, innatentive drivers, impulsive first responders and all manner of other threats. If I'm driving a car it's mostly boring. I have to actively work to keep my mind on task. I suspect others are like me, and that's why distracted driving is such a big problem.

Yeah, that's part of why we're better. We've got better filters. Think about all those poor people with mental disorders that don't allow them to auto-filter. Discriminatory power is gold. Subconscious discrimination is a superpower.

As someone with an "auto filter mental disorder" I have to work very hard to read this post charitably. I know this is the internet and written text is hard, but it would be easy to perceive this post as "othering" folks with metal illness. I don't think that was your intent, so that's why I'm writing this.

If he'd said "that's why we're better than squirrels" (which i took it as) you'd probably have not spoken up. Which would have been a shame, because having some aspects of "mental filtering disorder" myself I'd say we have a perspective others don't. We can appreciate the ability to ignore that most take for granted.

I spend time watching the wild, because the richness of detail I perceive is about the same in the woods or in the city. Out here the rhythms make more sense. In a crowded environment I'm grumpy as a wolverine with a toothache; in the woods I'm still irritable but at least I'm not in a mosh pit.

There's a lot to learn from watching squirrels. They can be overwhelmed by their own senses, with apparently contra-survival responses to that. In context it's hardly ever such a simple situation.

Thanks for putting in the work to read it favourably. I'll work on making my intent (which was less "look at those sub-humans" and more "be thankful for your gifts that not all have") clearer in the future.

You're still being myopic.

I know a guy who, when he was a kid, didn't pay attention in class. They put him in the TAG program, diagnosed him with ADHD and other mental disorders, and the school nurse would medicate him every morning so that he would sit down and be quiet.

I talked to him recently about this. He called it "involuntary medication" and was very upset. He felt that he had been raised from a young age to conform to a way of thinking that he didn't understand.

Are mental disorders real, or are they a way of othering those who we don't understand? I'm not sure.

Other birds do as well. They all pay attention to each other. I have a very active set of bird feeders in a rural area (so many species of birds and other animals use them at the same time). I am within sight to it for much of the day and it's very clear that they all cue off of each other. Some are more brave, others more timid but they all pay attention. A chipmunk or bird fight won't phase the others but a cat (or person or hawk overhead) will cause the birds to make what is, for some of them, a very clearly different call (usually loud and abrupt) and they all react at the same time.

I've watched birds land in front of me, turn their backs to me, and keep looking back. I wonder if they were assessing me as a potential threat for other birds. They do seem to let me get closer now.

Over 100 years ago, in Wild Animals I Have Known (1898), Ernest Thompson Seton describes this behavior in rabbits.

One of my favorite books.

I saw this in house rabbits allowed to roam the backyard supervised. When the crows alerted to raptors in the area, the rabbits would get low and head for cover.

"though the bluejay often tells lies for mischief you are safe to believe him when he brings ill news."

It is my favorite book. :D

In the birding world there's a thing called pishing. If you get it right you're basically alerting them to predators in the area and they come by to see what's up (and potentially mob the predator if need be). Great for taking pics.

[1] https://www.thespruce.com/pishing-to-attract-birds-386698

While in Africa on Safari, it quickly became clear that everything was listening to everything else, including us. It didn't take long to understand the various alert calls and use them to find big predators to shoot (with a camera!)

Excellent book on this topic:

https://www.amazon.com/What-Robin-Knows-Secrets-Natural/dp/0...

The graphic at the top of the article with the thought bubble is just fantastic

Reminds me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouwtdH2zt9s

I like that it's helpfully titled "Listening grey squirrel" just in case there was any remaining doubt of the subject.

I’m always surprised how, in my experience at least, people with less exposure to animals usually underestimate their ability to understand their surroundings and even feel emotions.

Might it be that birds just fly away immediately in the presence of a predator and for the same reason we humans find the sound of birds chirping so relaxing?

Seems like most of the predators that are dangerous to birds are also dangerous to squirrels but not to humans. Cats, falcons, foxes...

It is not always the case, it is not unusual that they change the way they sound. "Bird chirping" can roughly be divided into bird song and bird calls. Bird songs are for the most part relaxing, while bird calls are often used for warning purposes. Bird watchers learn to look out when the birds in an area change from the first to the latter. For example, I once looked around in this circumstance and soon saw an owl with a dead bird in its claws. I am not surprised that other animals, such as squirrels, learn to make the association too.

To add to this, songbirds also sometimes engange in mobbing when predators show up. Different species will all flock together and bombard the predator. I've watched it happen to my cat before when he was chasing chickadees around. All the birds in the yard ganged up on him and chased him off. He's not a very good hunter, so the birds weren't really in danger either way. One of my biology teachers mentioned if you make the right noises while walking through the forest, you can trick the song birds into thinking you're a predator and see the phenomenon for yourself.

But do cats make that chattering sound to lure birds with a false sense of safety?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plPcu0Le1Ts

It works in reverse. I remember reading ravens and wolves cooperate to hunt. The crows alert the wolves to prey, the wolves take care of it, then the crows share the spoils afterwards.

Sounds like what I learned from Ravens in Winter (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/122665.Ravens_in_Winter) an excellent read.

Fascinating. This particular behavior is somewhat widely known but it does serve as a hint that there are depths of animal behavior we haven't yet perceived. Billions of years of evolution have created fantastically complex interactive systems on the microscopic level, but we sometimes forget it's had just as much time to work on animal behaviors as it has their physical makeup. I suspect there's many more surprising things to find.

We have a bird feeder, which squirrels cannot (usually) get to but they hang out nearby to eat what falls out. We also have the occasional feral cat or two that swing by. I can attest that they are all listening to each other sound the alarm, so it makes sense they would also listen to the "all clear".

My wife also does, because if they sound the alarm that means a cat is nearby, and she comes over to the window to see if she can see the cat. This may have caused me to pay more attention to the whole interaction.

What bird feeder? Because every one I've ever tried has been promptly ransacked by squirrels immediately after filling it.

Sorry, didn't see the reply until now. I have a nothing special bird-feeder, but two things make it harder for squirrels to get to: 1) it is suspended, from high above, by a rope around a tree branch; it is high enough that they cannot jump up to it from below (well, it is high enough now, anyway, since I saw them doing that) 2) just above the bird feeder is a dome, with a hole in the center, through which the rope passes. There is a stick which the rope is tied around, which keeps the dome just above the bird feeder. If the squirrel climbs down the rope from above, the dome keeps them from getting to the bird feeder.

Off topic, this does raise the question of who we listen to to not be terrorised by squirrels.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-45150298

(Sorry mods)

Why are they so distracted, paranoid, and cute? Squirrels are truly my spirit animal

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