Jennifer Ackerman > Quotes

“AS A HUMAN BEING,” Einstein once wrote, “one has been endowed with just enough intelligence to be able to see clearly how utterly inadequate that intelligence is when confronted with what exists.”
― Jennifer Ackerman, The Genius of Birds

“Being in nature refreshes us by ... allowing us to surrender to involuntary attention: the effortless and often enjoyable noticing of sensory stimuli in our environment.”
― Jennifer Ackerman

“Each spring the robins nesting in our cherry tree attack the side mirror of our car as if it were a rival, pecking furiously at their own reflections while streaking the door with guano. But who among us hasn’t been toppled by our vanity or made an enemy of our own image?”
― Jennifer Ackerman, The Genius of Birds

“لقد تسبب توماس أديسون، أكثر من أي شخص آخر، بتراجع الظلام ونقص الأحلام.”
― Jennifer Ackerman, Sex Sleep Eat Drink Dream: A Day in the Life of Your Body

“قد يبدو اكتشاف مصدر الصوت وتفسيره عملا سهلا، لكنّه عمل معقد جدا؛ فعندما نسمع شخصا ما ينادينا باسمنا ونتجه نحو الصوت، فنحن نعول على قدرة دماغنا على حساب الاتجاه من الفارق الزمني بين الأذنين؛ وهو الفرق في الزمن الذي يستغرقه الصوت للوصول إلى أذنينا.”
― Jennifer Ackerman, Sex Sleep Eat Drink Dream: A Day in the Life of Your Body

“If one of the species you’re using in your experiment fails every test you give it, the problem may be you, the researcher, not the animal. You may have failed to understand what is relevant to the way a bird sees the world.”
― Jennifer Ackerman, The Genius of Birds

“Every forest has its own character, its own whispered rumors and smells.”
― Jennifer Ackerman, The Genius of Birds

“A narrow-minded man can lead one to devalue others, and in the end, to desperately dangerous hates of outsiders, ranging in expression from discrimination against minorities to world conflagrations,' Tolman wrote. The solution? Create broader cognitive maps in the mind that encompass bigger geographical boundaries and a wider social scope, embracing those we might consider others, and in this way encourage empathy and understanding.”
― Jennifer Ackerman, The Genius of Birds

“Birds are facing change on a scale unknown in their evolutionary history. This is a result of the Anthropocene—the new epoch of man-made change that is contributing to what has been called the sixth mass extinction.”
― Jennifer Ackerman, The Genius of Birds

“Tempting as it may be to interpret the behavior of other animals in terms of human mental processes, it's perhaps even more tempting to reject the possibility of kinship. It's what primatologist Frans de Waal calls "anthropodenial," blindness to humankind characteristics of other species,"Those who are in anthropodenial," says de Waal, "try to build a brick wall to separate humans from the rest of the animal kingdom.”
― Jennifer Ackerman, The Genius of Birds

“An owl’s auditory system shares with other birds another superpower we mammals don’t possess: it doesn’t age.”
― Jennifer Ackerman, What an Owl Knows: The New Science of the World's Most Enigmatic Birds

“I love this idea, that nature dreamed up the same kind of sleep in both humans and birds, fostering the growth of big brains in creatures so far apart on life’s tree.”
― Jennifer Ackerman, The Genius of Birds

“He taught me the difference between casual “birdwatching” and the more intense, focused “birding,” and urged me to go beyond identifying birds to noting their actions and behavior.”
― Jennifer Ackerman, The Genius of Birds

“We think of owls as short legged because they tuck in their legs at rest and in flight. But most have long, well-muscled legs, up to half the length of their bodies, with strong bones, especially in their feet.”
― Jennifer Ackerman, What an Owl Knows: The New Science of the World's Most Enigmatic Birds

“It’s a telling example of how basic owl science has boosted human medicine—and how an owl’s eyes and ears work together.”
― Jennifer Ackerman, What an Owl Knows: The New Science of the World's Most Enigmatic Birds

“I can't imagine pressing on relentlessly through day and night with mind, body, spirit in a single state, can't imagine denying myself the possibility of a fresh start.”
― Jennifer Ackerman, Sex Sleep Eat Drink Dream: A Day in the Life of Your Body

“In the 1990s, reports began to roll in from New Caledonia, a small island in the South Pacific, of crows that fashion their own tools in the wild and appear to transmit local styles of toolmaking from one generation to the next—a feat reminiscent of human culture and proof that sophisticated tool skills do not require a primate brain.”
― Jennifer Ackerman, The Genius of Birds

“A frigate bird with a seven-foot wingspan has a skeleton that weighs less than its feathers.”
― Jennifer Ackerman, The Genius of Birds

“وهنا، يمكن القول بأن هناك معيارا جديدا للشخصية وإمكانية بناء الصداقة: تثاءب وراقب من الذي تجاوب معك بالتثاؤب.”
― Jennifer Ackerman, Sex Sleep Eat Drink Dream: A Day in the Life of Your Body

“If a bird’s hair cells are damaged by disease or loud noises—say, by the blasting decibels of a rock concert in a domed stadium—they can regenerate. Ours can’t.)”
― Jennifer Ackerman, The Genius of Birds

“José Luis Peña, a neuroscientist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and his collaborators have discovered that the sound localization system in a barn owl’s brain performs sophisticated mathematical computations to execute this pinpointing of prey.”
― Jennifer Ackerman, What an Owl Knows: The New Science of the World's Most Enigmatic Birds

“It’s a notion that was proposed three decades ago by Jane Goodall and her colleague Hans Kummer. The pair made a plea for measuring a wild animal’s intelligence by looking at its ability to find solutions to problems in its natural setting. What’s needed is an ecological rather than a laboratory measure of intelligence, they suggested. This can be found in an animal’s ability to innovate in its own environment, “to find a solution to a novel problem, or a novel solution to an old one.”
― Jennifer Ackerman, The Genius of Birds

“What kind of intelligence allows a bird to anticipate the arrival of a distant storm? Or find its way to a place it has never been before, though it may be thousands of miles away? Or precisely imitate the complex songs of hundreds of other species? Or hide tens of thousands of seeds over hundreds of square miles and remember where it put them six months later? (I would flunk these sorts of intelligence tests as readily as birds might fail mine.)”
― Jennifer Ackerman, The Genius of Birds

“Tiny fairywren Who is your father? *snake chomp* Guess we’ll never know”
― Jennifer Ackerman, The Bird Way: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think

“If you happened to find yourself at the foot of the stairs in the White House on a typical afternoon sometime around 1804 or 1805, you might have noticed a perky bird in a pearl-gray coat ascending the steps behind Thomas Jefferson, hop by hop, as the president retired to his chambers for a siesta. This was Dick. Although the president didn’t dignify his pet mockingbird with one of the fancy Celtic or Gallic names he gave his horses and sheepdogs—Cucullin, Fingal, Bergère—still it was a favorite pet. “I sincerely congratulate you on the arrival of the Mocking bird,” Jefferson wrote to his son-in-law, who had informed him of the advent of the first resident mockingbird. “Learn all the children to venerate it as a superior being in the form of a bird.” Dick may well have been one of the two mockingbirds Jefferson bought in 1803. These were pricier than most pet birds ($10 or $15 then—around $125 now) because their serenades included not only renditions of all the birds of the local woods, but also popular American, Scottish, and French songs. Not everyone would pick this bird for a friend. Wordsworth called him the “merry mockingbird.” Brash, yes. Saucy and animated. But merry? His most common call is a bruising tschak!—a kind of unlovely avian expletive that one naturalist described as a cross between a snort of disgust and a hawking of phlegm. But Jefferson adored Dick for his uncommon intelligence, his musicality, and his remarkable ability to mimic. As the president’s friend Margaret Bayard Smith wrote, “Whenever he was alone he opened the cage and let the bird fly about the room. After flitting for a while from one object to another, it would alight on his table and regale him with its sweetest notes, or perch on his shoulder and take its food from his lips.” When the president napped, Dick would sit on his couch and serenade him with both bird and human tunes.”
― Jennifer Ackerman, The Genius of Birds

“In some cities, you can find smoked cigarette butts in sparrow nests, which effectively function as a parasite repellent. Butts from smoked cigarettes retain large amounts of nicotine and other toxic substances, including traces of pesticides that repel all kinds of harmful creepy crawlies—an apparently ingenious new use of materials.”
― Jennifer Ackerman, The Genius of Birds

“In scoping out the party crowd, does one face catch your eye? The Tierra del Fuegans have an expression, mamihlapinatapei, which is listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the world's mist succinct word. It refers to the act of 'looking into each other's eyes, each hoping that the other will initiate what both want to do but neither chooses to commence.”
― Jennifer Ackerman, Sex Sleep Eat Drink Dream: A Day in the Life of Your Body

“A native landscape enters a child’s mind through a meld of sensations: the smell of seaweed or hay, the sound of cicadas, the cold grit of stone. It is all heart and magic, confusion rather than order, but the feeling it evokes is wholly satisfying and lasting. Gaining this kind of deep familiarity with a landscape other than your native one is like learning to speak a foreign language. You can’t hope for quick or easy fluency. You work from the outside in, by accumulating a vocabulary of observed details. You learn where things happen in the rhythmic revolutions of the days and the year, which shrubs harbor families of grackles, which stands of beach plum send out sprays of August bloom, where the hog-nose snake waits for its toad, and the toad for its fly. Slowly the strange becomes familiar; the familiar becomes precious.”
― Jennifer Ackerman, Birds by the Shore: Observing the Natural Life of the Atlantic Coast

“MIGRATION IS ANOTHER TRADE-OFF. Birds that migrate have smaller brains than their sedentary relatives. This makes sense, as a brain that consumes a lot of energy and develops slowly would be too costly for birds that travel a lot.”
― Jennifer Ackerman, The Genius of Birds

“One African grey I know, Throckmorton, pronounces his name with Shakespearean precision. Named for the man who served as an intermediary for Mary, Queen of Scots (and was hanged in 1584 for conspiring against Queen Elizabeth I), Throckmorton has a wide repertoire of household sounds, including the voices of his family members, Karin and Bob, which he uses to his advantage. He calls out Karin’s name in a “Bob voice” that Karin describes as spot-on; she can’t tell the difference. He also mimics the different rings of Karin’s and Bob’s cell phones. One of his favorite ploys is to summon Bob from the garage by imitating his cell phone ring. When Bob comes running, Throckmorton “answers” the call in Bob’s voice: “Hello! Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh.” Then he finishes with the flat ring tone of hanging up. Throckmorton imitates the glug, glug sound of Karin drinking water and the slurping sound of Bob trying to cool his hot coffee while he sips it, as well as the bark of the family’s former dog, a Jack Russell terrier dead nine years. He has also nailed the bark of the current family pet, a miniature schnauzer, and will join him in a chorus of barking, “making my house sound like a kennel,” says Karin. “Again, he’s pitch perfect; no one can tell it’s a parrot barking and not a dog.” Once, when Bob had a cold, Throckmorton added to his corpus the sounds of nose blowing, coughing, and sneezing. And another time, when Bob came home from a business trip with a terrible stomach bug, Throckmorton made sick-to-my-stomach sounds for the next six months. For one long stretch, his preferred “Bob” word was “Shhhhhhhhiiiit.”
― Jennifer Ackerman, The Genius of Birds