I am in Awe
One of my siblings, an active commenter, drew my attention to this fascinating (and apparently very popular) bit of the David Attenborough repertoire.Watch the video and be amazed. At the same time, and Attenborough points it out, in a way I feel terribly sorry for this very accomplished bird, who is desperately engaged in the sort of activities we male primates do when we engage in asinine behaviour, hoping to impress specific others, and the poor fellow probably really cares about how it all works out for him.
On a broader point, I have seen only a small number of episodes of Attenborough's 'Birds' series so I am sure there are good DVDs out there for me. I do recall his walking through some woods in one episoide simply commenting brilliantly on the bird calls hewas hearing from the trees. As someone who listens fanatically even on my simple morning jogs, I was really impressed at the depth of his awareness.
posted by Alan Adamson @ 8:06 AM
1 Comments:
"Mere mimicry"! I could not do anything the like of this. And anyone who wants a cheap version of this should just pay attention to the neighbourhood starlings, who are also amazing, if perhaps unsettlingly numerous.
I still wonder, deep in my heart, whether the women really care about the chainsaw. But when I watch us primates, I wonder the same way whether the antics we invest in buy us much either. It's actually interesting - the right analysis here is whether it buys something at the margin (for the female bird just struggling to deicde, and concluding, "Hey, the other guys can't do that chainsaw sound, I think I want kids that can" - and of course they likely experience this marginal experience in some different way - like "Wow, is that dude bird cool!"), and this is exactly the way economists would try to grasp it.
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