How Real Birds Outsmarted Academic Birdbrains
This story could be considered ironic, but for one thing. Liberals don’t do irony. At the link is a story about magpies. So, what? Wait, there’s more. It is about how a small, feathered creature with no resources and very little brains outwitted a group of scientists. You know really smart people backed up with a large budget, state of the art techology and high expectations.
Just imagine assembling a team of noted scientists. They devise a scheme to track the mating habits of magpies. Why? Government grant money is there for the asking. These scientists team with engineers to design a tracking device. Months, maybe years and thousands of dollars later they all holler Eureka! It is done.
This team of intrepid scientists go out and mug five magpies. They strap the devices on the birds. Soon their every secret will be known. Then the plan came crashing down.
During our pilot study, we found out how quickly magpies team up to solve a group problem. Within ten minutes of fitting the final tracker, we witnessed an adult female without a tracker working with her bill to try and remove the harness off of a younger bird. Within hours, most of the other trackers had been removed. By day 3, even the dominant male of the group had its tracker successfully dismantled.
The Conversation (academic journal)
It took the bird brains three days to remove the devices and defeat the cadre of scientific and engineering minds that set out to solve the problem. I know where they screwed up. They should have developed a marketing plan to convince the magpies that they needed the newest iPhone. It would be available in colors pleasing to magpies. Had they done this, they wouldn’t have had to mug those five magpies. All of the magpies would have wanted an iPhone and gladly paid for the privilege of owning one. With the iPhone in place the scientists could have tracked the movements of the magpies, listened to their conversations, checked the IM’s, Twitter and email and perused the magpie family albums.
I can’t claim credit for the idea. It is already being used on humans.
