a while back i was trying to collect certain published articles on animal intelligence and animal speech but i stopped. i should really pick that back up again. i just came across someone talking about articles published recently about decoding animal language.
ah, i see, a newyorker article was published yesterday, that's what that post was referring to
just some notes on the article: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/10/21/how-scientists-started-to-decode-birdsong
okay it starts by working to establish sociality among animals, notions of "elaborate social structures" with some examples and then quoting a researcher (Kleindorfer) who tells us about the information stored in a call between geese
oh god, hearing this researcher talk about their experience is painful
"Early in her education, as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, she was taught that “male songbirds sing, females don’t, and if females do sing it’s an error.”"
academia's notion of animals has been so fucked for so long it's nice to see someone breaking out of that.
ooooh Kleindorfer presents distinct responses to different warning calls by warbler chicks to adult warblers.
""If I put a snake nearby, the parental alarm call made the chicks in the nest jump... If I put a marsh harrier”—a hawklike predatory bird—“nearby, the response to the parental alarm call was that the chicks would duck.” The chicks were responding appropriately to different alarm calls—a satisfying finding."
then she reports that they have findings of fairy wrens singing to their eggs! (incubation calls) and says that the babies' "begging calls" matched an element from the mother's calls, which they use to say that birds learn their "mother tongue" while still in ovo.
the article suddenly references an "MIT Computational Linguist" who is just like "no they're not talking like we talk" which is really weird for the article but the narration seems to go back to "we've tried to separate ourselves from non-human animals... we should see what the birds have to say about that" so i'm at least thankful for that.
now we shift, Mythology, stories, and the ways birds show up in them, their "divine" or "perfect" language transmitting things to gods. they denigrate imitation here as "not understanding" - all i can think of are the birds who have been taught to describe things (most notably the bird Apollo)
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i've run out of space here, moving on to a second post
then we hit a double play of Berwick and Chomsky to establish the prior belief that its "only us" who speak, so that we can show how other researchers (Cheney and Seyfarth) observed a group of Vervet Monkeys and their behaviors with regard to certain sounds... "one recorded vervet vocalization made vervets look up, presumably for eagles; another made them look down, presumably for pythons; and a third sent them running up into the trees, a good defense against approaching leopards. Young vervets sometimes use these calls faultily, perhaps sounding a leopard alarm for a warthog. But they get better as they grow up. They learn."
and a quick spattering of different vocalization/responses
"A newer generation of scientists has been trying to understand bird vocalizations. The alarm calls of Siberian jays can be said to have been partially translated. One of their screeches indicates a sitting hawk (which prompts other jays to come together in a group), another a flying hawk (jays hide, which makes them difficult to spot), and a third a hawk actively attacking (jays fly to the treetops to search for the attacker, and possibly flee). When cheery birds known as tufted titmice make a piercing sound, other titmice may respond by collectively harrying an invading predator. Some birds even lie. Fork-tailed drongos—common, innocuous-looking little dark birds that live in Africa—sometimes mimic the alarm calls of starlings or meerkats. Duped listeners flee the nonexistent threat, leaving behind a buffet for the drongo."
