Bad birds flying under the radar

To my chagrin, I recently discovered that a considerable amount of bad bird behavior has been sneaking past me.

To be fair, this blog has been on the case even when birds are trying to avoid scrutiny by being in the news in a language other than English. We also did not miss the annual Thanksgiving update on the dangers of turkeys.

But then I spent part of the slow internet season over the holidays catching up on the always interesting Nothing to Do With Arbroath, where I found the story reported last time of the hawk flying into a woman's home to attack her Chihuahua.

And upon further perusal, I found that this blog is a trove of bird stories from the past couple of months. We've got some run-of-the-mill destructiveness:

-In England, a car dealership has had to supply umbrellas to customers even in fair weather to protect them from seagulls. Otherwise they're bombarded by both bird poo and trash from a nearby dump. "If you don't run to the showroom from your car, you will look like a dalmatian. We have had chicken carcasses and tea bags dropped on our forecourt. Chicken carcasses, dropped from a great height, will dent the cars."

-In Oklahoma, starlings tried to ruin Christmas by eating the lightbulbs in a courthouse Christmas star, costing the town $1,200 for replacements.

But, in some more interesting cases, we've got birds using a variety of strategies to get humans in hot water:

-In Wales a woman who caused a firey car crash claimed she had been distracted by a magpie flying alongside her car. To be fair, the fact that her alcohol level was over three times the legal limit may have contributed to the situation.

-But working with human vices isn't their only approach - playing on people's sympathies works too: in Lynn, Massachusetts, an 80-year-old woman is facing criminal charges for illegally feeding ducks and geese.

-And in New York, a pigeon nicknamed Fred has been dive-bombing police assigned to patrol the construction site at the former World Trade Center. Not only is Fred pooping on them, the officers have been reprimanded for defending themselves. Allegedly due to public complaints, a source told the New York Post, “We were told that if we didn’t go easy on the bird, we would get in trouble.”




Yet another warning from Flickr user Andrew Eason.

Ominous trends in bad animal behavior

-Last week we learned of some unexpected animals interfering with air travel when turtles blocked a runway at Kennedy airport in New York. At least those animals were in their native country.

Imagine the surprise of having your flight delayed in Manchester, England by a pink flamingo. It took five hours to capture the culprit, and the most disturbing aspect of this case is that the origin of the bird is a mystery: all the local wildlife sanctuaries denied having lost a flamingo.

-Remember the scientists who discovered that crows can remember the faces of individual people that have done unpleasant things to them? Maybe you reassured yourself that crows aren't that common in your neighborhood.

Well, other scientists now report that the same is true of pigeons tested in a city park in Paris. The pigeons in this study learned to stay away from people who had chased them. But can we be sure that staying away will be their only strategy?

-Recently this blog reported on some British cows who had learned to let themselves out of their barn. At least they stayed on the property. In Wales, a herd escaped into a residential neighborhood and reportedly trampled gardens, ate flowers, and, most disturbingly, peered into people's windows.

You can see from the photo above that this was not the sort of rural lane where people expect to share their space with livestock. As one resident said, "We are used to having pints of milk delivered to our doorstep but not the whole cow."

Amazing animal abilities... not so much

Homing pigeons are astonishing animals. Despite the poor reputation of urban pigeons in modern times, pigeons have long been of service to humanity, for many centuries delivering messages faster than any available technology. During the two World Wars, pigeons were even awarded medals for their service carrying critical military information.

More recently, they've been used to protest the poor quality of internet access in rural communities: in a demonstration in England, ten pigeons carring USB sticks reached their destination in ninety minutes, beating out a video download started at the moment of their release that had only managed to process 24% of a 300MB file.

All of these uses harness the pigeon's remarkable natural ability to find their way to their home roost from any location. Racing pigeons, driven in closed trucks for several hundred miles to a place they've never been, will unerringly find their way home, flying at speeds of 40 to 60 miles per hour.

Or... not.

A bird named Houdini was released for her first race, an easy 200 miles from Guernsey to Dudley in the West Midlands of England that should have taken only six hours. When she didn't arrive, her owner assumed she'd met with foul play and that he'd never hear of her again.

Over a month later he got a phone call from Gustavo Ortiz, who'd tracked him down using the information on the bird's leg band. The call was from a rather surprising location, as the owner explained to the Daily Mirror:

"I was gobsmacked. I didn't even know where Panama was."
"I've no idea how Houdini got there - I can only assume she hitched a lift on a ship across the Atlantic. They must have fed her on the boat because she's in perfect shape judging by the pictures Gustavo emailed me."

Did Houdini really get that drastically lost, sullying the proud reputation of her species for navigation? Or had she flown the coop deliberately, hitching a lift to a better climate? Either way, it's too expensive to ship her back, so she'll be staying in her new country - well, at least for now, till she gets lost or takes a notion to hitch a ride again.



World's first airmail stamp from the Great Barrier Island Pigeon-Gram Service from Wikimedia Commons.

Updates: Animals behaving humanly

We reported recently on a cat that took the ferry to Spain from England. Concern that this was a symptom of a bigger problem was confirmed by our crack bad behavior research team, which dug up two stories about dogs that take the subway in Moscow. One, in the Financial Times, quotes extensively from a biologist that studies the packs of stray dogs living in the city:

Neuronov says there are some 500 strays that live in the metro stations, especially during the colder months, but only about 20 have learned how to ride the trains. This happened gradually, first as a way to broaden their territory. Later, it became a way of life. “Why should they go by foot if they can move around by public transport?” he asks.

Regular readers of this blog won't be surprised that these strays have their human enablers:

The metro dog also has uncannily good instincts about people, happily greeting kindly passers by, but slinking down the furthest escalator to avoid the intolerant older women who oversee the metro’s electronic turnstiles. “Right outside this metro,” says Neuronov, gesturing toward Frunzenskaya station, a short distance from the park where we were speaking, “a black dog sleeps on a mat. He’s called Malish. And this is what I saw one day: a bowl of freshly ground beef set before him, and slowly, and ever so lazily, he scooped it up with his tongue while lying down.”

Dogs aren't the only lazy animals who've gotten the idea that human transportation is a good deal. We've previously seen a bird trying to hitch a ride on a plane, and now there's also this video of a pigeon taking the subway in Toronto.

These animals might be interested to know what happened to a cat in England who took the same bus every day for four years: he was killed by a hit and run driver while crossing the road to get to the bus stop. His owner was quoted in the Daily Mail:

She said: 'Casper was quite quick for his age but I was trying to stop him from riding the bus so much.

'He had no road sense whatsoever but he loved people.

'He'd queue up in line good as gold - it'd be 'person, person, person, cat, person, person'.'

Sad, but instructive. As we humans well know, taking advantage of our transportation technology has its downsides. Maybe animals - who can already run, climb, swim and fly better than we can - should stick to what they're good at.

Moving on: this video from Japan, always on the forefront of treating animals humanly, shows a family that sends its pet penguin to the grocery store on its own. We have to grant that at least this penguin is pulling its weight in the household more than most animals do.

The Japanese are probably also not helping matters by believing that some of their cats can actually speak.

A final quick addition to a topic we have been following: add cigarettes and coffee to the list of substances that bees like to abuse, which already included bees alcohol and cocaine. Scientists in Israel found that they also prefer nectar that is spiked with caffeine and nicotine.


Dog on the Moscow metro by Flickr user Adam Baker.

Animal espionage dogs Iranians

The news business has fallen on hard times. How can you doubt it when you can't find any followup to this story from 2007:

Iranian Police Smash Squirrel Spy Ring

SKY NEWS UK Thursday July 12, 2007
Police in Iran are reported to have taken 14 squirrels into custody - because they are suspected of spying.

The rodents were found near the Iranian border allegedly equipped with eavesdropping devices.

The reports have come from the official Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA).

The IRNA said that the squirrels were kitted out by foreign intelligence services - but they were captured two weeks ago by police officers.

A Foreign Office source told Sky News: "The story is nuts."

Of course the Foreign office would deny it, but outside experts were also dubious about the accusations against the squirrels. When asked by NPR about the possibility of training squirrels to be spies, professor John Koprowski, co-author of North American Tree Squirrels, suggested that it would be difficult to "channel their elusiveness" into "constructive activity" in the field.

Still, clearly there were squirrels lurking suspiciously near the border - and their fate seems to be unknown. But that hasn't stopped other species from getting into the game, since Iran also arrested some spying pigeons near a nuclear facility in 2008.

Asked to comment on the pigeon story, one diplomat told Sky News, "It's clear there has been some sort of coo in Tehran."

Perhaps there's a bright side to all the sneaky bad behavior on the part of animals in the Middle East. With all the zoos downsizing due to the state of the economy, maybe some of those unemployed keepers can get work as prison staff in Iran.

Squirrel by, once again, the excellent Misterqueue.

Pigeons gone bad

Street pigeons are considered by many to be no better than rats with wings. But carrier pigeons have a noble history of service to humans, including carrying messages in two world wars. Unfortunately - perhaps because work is scarce for them, with all the other communications technology we have now - it seems that these days they're not picky about who they associate with.

SAO PAULO (AFP) – To smuggle cellphones into prison, Brazilian inmates have turned to a much older form of communication: carrier pigeons.

Guards have intercepted two carrier pigeons carrying cellphones to detainees at a prison in Sorocaba, some 62 miles (100 kilometers) from Sao Paolo, a spokeswoman for the state penitentiary system told AFP.

"Penitentiary agents found the pigeons outside the Danilo Pinheiro prison but, fortunately, the birds did not have time to enter the prison building with the material," said Rosana Alberto.

Each pigeon was carrying a small bag containing a cellphone and charger, she said. They were caught in two successive days, last Wednesday and Thursday.

In fact it seems like pigeons are easily bribed to change sides in either direction. As reported by the AP:

Guards at the Danilio Pinheiro prison near the southeastern city of Sorocaba last week noticed a pigeon resting on an electric wire with a small cloth bag tied to one of its legs.

"The guards nabbed the bird after luring it down with some food and discovered components of a small cell phone inside the bag," police investigator Celso Soramiglio said Tuesday.

Photo by Flickr user Wolfraven.