I thought this book would be a lot like Becoming a Tiger, or Wildhood, but it’s quite different. While the focus is on animal intelligence and learning, it’s more about why they have culture in their different population groups, than about how that information is actually passed down from older animals to younger ones (although there are plenty examples of that). It gets very detailed in parts, and philosophical in others, and sometimes meanders into related side topics, which in this case I didn’t at all mind. There are three sections, about three very different animals, though each also has some examples and anecdotes from other species. The first part is about sperm whales, how they stay together in family groups via communication (there’s no physical boundaries in the ocean) and how the young are protected and supported by the group because calves can’t follow their mother down on deep dives after food. It’s also a lot about how humans previously hunted whales to near extinction, and how that changed some of their behavior, and what things are shifting back (in different ways) now that we’ve mostly stopped. This all includes personal close encounters as the author went out on a boat with research scientists who were tagging and listening in on sperm whales off the coast of Dominica in the Caribbean. So there’s a bit of science-in-the-field writing (which I really like), and also the author’s personal responses to being so close to such huge, wild and yet very gentle creatures.
The next part of the book is about parrots, specifically macaws. Again, the author traveled to the Amazon to observe macaws in the wild with researchers, marveled at their striking colors, learned some things about their behavior, nesting site choices, chick-rearing strategies, interactions with humans (some were rescued and people are attempting to rehabilitate them back into the wild) and so on. But mostly, this part is about beauty. Why are some birds so beautiful, in ways that we appreciate? (Warthogs are probably attractive to each other, but we usually don’t find them so). What purpose does flamboyant display serve in nature and evolution. Well, his conclusion is simply that female birds like males that are gorgeous, that stand out (and they can afford to because the large parrots don’t have many predators). He makes the argument that beauty makes the world go round just as much as any other drive- that birds do have motivation to sing because they feel good about it (not just because they’re yelling to warn rivals away, or to call potential mates near). It doesn’t have to be: birds sing because they are happy, or contrariwise: birds sing because they are just communicating something, pushed by evolutionary goals. It can be both. That made me sit back and think.
The last section gave me the same reaction, but in a totally different vein. This part is about chimpanzee behavior, namely how their society is ordered. The males are driven by aggression, but a good high-ranking male can quell that among others and more or less keep the peace. They wage war on rival chimpanzee groups, like humans and ants do. Other ape relatives don’t- bonobos solve things -ahem- by making love, orangutans are mostly solitary, etc. But they way Safina writes about chimpanzee conflicts and communication and the male need for power and control, makes you look very uncomfortably at the same aspects of human behavior. Especially if you compare it to how well other animal societies manage to get along without waging war or killing their own kind. I am pretty sure that other animals have killed conspecifics- I know I’ve read of wolves doing so, and maybe hyenas? though the author adamantly asserts only humans and chimps are so brutal is that really true. This is another book sure to stay on my shelf, definitely worth a re-read to facilitate some more thinking, and I’m already making a new TBR list suggested from the bibliography.