Pod Insights Science Friday Chickens Have Friendships And Reputations | Tourist Photos May Help Map Penguin Colonies About this episode Author and naturalist Sy Montgomery discusses chicken intelligence and her experience raising a flock in New Hampshire. And, snapshots from over the years could provide researchers with valuable data about how penguin colonies have shifted.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:04 Speaker 02 What can you learn about chicken intelligence by watching your very own personal flock?
1:10 Speaker 03 Their social lives are exquisitely important to them. Belonging to a flock is what matters.
1:16 Speaker 02 It's Thursday, November 7, and you're listening to Science Friday.
1:23 Speaker 02 I'm Sci-Fry producer Charles Burquist. This episode, two stories about our relationship with birds. In a bit, a trip out to Antarctica, where we'll hear how tourist photos can help ecologists studying penguin colonies. But first, guest host Rachel Feltman talks with naturalist and author Cy Montgomery about her new book, What the Chicken Knows. Here's Rachel.
1:46 Speaker 04 I want to spend some time with another popular bird: chickens. They don't exactly have a reputation of being the sharpest creatures in the animal kingdom. I mean, it's hard to think of another animal whose major claim to fame is running around with its head cut off. But talk to anyone who raises chickens, and they'll tell you that these birds are far more intelligent and social than we often give them credit for. My next guest is among that flock and has firsthand experience of the bond between human and chicken, Si Montgomery, author of the new book, What the Chicken Knows: A New Appreciation of the World's Most Familiar Bird. She's based in Hancock, New Hampshire. Si, welcome to Science Friday.
2:29 Speaker 03 I'm thrilled to be here.
2:31 Speaker 04 So, how has your understanding of chickens changed since you first started keeping them?
2:37 Speaker 03 Well, I kind of went into having our first flock with beginner's mind, and I didn't really have any expectations, except that I knew I would love them. Whatever they wanted to show me, I was going to be thrilled. And sure enough, day one, I was absolutely gobsmacked. I got a flock from my dear friend Gretchen Moran. It was a housewarming or barnwarming present. And she had raised these chicks at her house. And my husband and I went over to visit them when they were tiny fluffy chicks. And when they were old enough, they came to live in our barn. Well, I was absolutely certain that the minute I let them out of
3:18 Speaker 03 the barn, they'd become lost on our eight acres of fields and woods. But Gretchen told me, just leave them in 48 hours, and when you let them out, they'll know where they live, and they will know to come home at night. And I gotta tell you, when I was a kid, one time, we moved to a new house, and I was literally lost in the backyard. But these chickens, not. And there have been scientific studies showing that these birds have incredible spatial abilities, that they can find the center of any given area instantly, even in the absence of landmarks, and even without
4:02 Speaker 03 ever having been there before. They are really, really good at finding out where everything is and understanding what their territory is, which I am not.
4:12 Speaker 04 I was gonna say, that sounds like they're better at that than I am. So, yeah, chickens have these surprising innate skills, but what do they learn over time?
4:23 Speaker 03 Well, they remember the past and they anticipate the future. And that sounds like, wow, gee, that's fantastic. But of course, you know, this has enormous evolutionary value for almost everybody. Because if you don't remember the past, you can't anticipate the future and you can't be an active participant in your own fate. So my hens, for example, remembered predator attacks and they remembered the places that they had successfully hidden in the past. They also remember at least, and this has been found also by researchers, that chickens can remember at least 100 different faces.
5:05 Speaker 03 And that's chicken faces, but they remember our faces as well. And they look at your face just like you would look at your friend's face. You recognize your friend even if they're wearing an overcoat or if they're wearing a bathing suit by looking at their face. And these researchers discovered that when they dressed up chickens in costumes, as long as they left their faces okay, they too were able to find their friends even when they were wearing something else. But if you messed with their combs or their beaks or their wattles, it was like putting a mask, a Halloween mask on somebody. They couldn't tell who their friends were.
5:44 Speaker 04 Wow, that's very impressive and also sounds like a completely delightful study.
5:50 Speaker 03 Dressing chickens, wouldn't that be a good job?
5:53 Speaker 04 So you've talked about, you know, how devoted you are to your chickens. What do we know about how chickens sort of make sense of their relationships with their human caretakers?
6:05 Speaker 03 Well, to a chicken, your social life is really everything. Your flock is your cohesive social unit. It's your community. And that can include people in the flock, just like I certainly include animals in my family, even if they're not, you know, human or genetically related to me. We all feel that way. But my chickens were able to perceive a subtle change in our relationship with our neighbors even before we did. This was the amazing thing. For a long time, we lived next door to this nice man. And we would see him every once in a while and we'd help each other out when we needed. Then he moved away.
6:49 Speaker 03 Well, all during this time, our hens never jumped on the low stone wall that separated our properties, even though their barn was closer to the neighbor's house than to ours. Well, the next folks to move in after the house had sat vacant was this great family of a mom and her two kids, aged seven and nine. And they fell in love with our black and white spotted pig, Christopher Hogwood. And soon they were over the house every day, playing with the pig, playing with our dog and playing with our chickens. And we were over their house as well. And that was when I noticed this profound change in our flock's behavior. They had never before jumped over that low stone wall,
7:34 Speaker 03 even though there were certainly delicious bugs and worms over there. But when they perceived that our two households had become one unit, immediately they annexed the neighbor's property.
7:47 Speaker 04 Wow, that is really cool. One thing that I found really interesting and hadn't really thought about before reading your book is that a lot of people who keep backyard chickens only keep hens. So why do roosters get such a bad rap?
8:02 Speaker 03 Oh, it's very sad. I mean, in some cultures, roosters are revered and justly so. Some cultures say that when a rooster crows, it's because he's seen an angel. And I love that idea.
8:15 Speaker 04 Yeah.
8:16 Speaker 03 A lot of people in suburban areas, I think, are disturbed to have someone crowing early when they'd rather sleep late. And the other thing that can happen, doesn't happen all the time, but sometimes your rooster can turn on you and start attacking people. Now, the reason for this is that he's defending his flock. And I found this out one time in an infamous moment when our minister came to visit.
8:45 Speaker 03 He was bringing over his, his new fiancee and her two small children and wanted to enchant them with our petting zoo. And they were a little frightened by the 750 pound pig when he came bucking out of his stall with his razor sharp tusks. So he said, well, kids, let's, let's meet somebody more your size. And he started petting one of my hens. Well, what you do when you pet a hen is you start at their head and you go over their back and the hen will often crouch and raise her arms a little bit, her wings a little bit. And what this is known as is the sex crouch and it's a position that she assumes so a rooster can jump on her and mate with her.
9:29 Speaker 03 Well, of course Graham didn't realize he was doing anything wrong, but our rooster looked up from across the barnyard and he saw our minister having sex with one of his hens. So he came rushing over and he had these big spurs and he attacked our minister who unfortunately was wearing shorts.
9:50 Speaker 04 Oh, no.
9:51 Speaker 03 And bloodied his legs, terrified the children, upset the new fiancee, complete failure of a visit.
9:58 Speaker 04 Well, and tell me about your, your neighbor who actually runs a rooster rescue. You know, how is she able to soothe their more aggressive tendencies?
10:09 Speaker 03 Well, Ashley Nagley is so awesome. She lives catty cornered across the street from us. And frankly, although we have acres of land, but I never hear them crowing. But she started rescuing unwanted roosters, roosters who had turned and people were afraid their kids were going to be hurt, roosters who people just didn't like them crowing and dumped them in the woods. And what she says you should do to turn a rogue rooster into a gentleman is completely counterintuitive. She told me what you should do. Is pick them up and cuddle them.
10:46 Speaker 04 Wow.
10:47 Speaker 03 Carry them around while you're doing your chores. Just give them love. It is the most amazing thing. It doesn't seem like anything you would normally do. Because roosters, you know, they've got sharp beaks and they've got sharp spurs. And people justly fear them. But she says, you know, pick him up in a blanket or a towel to keep those spurs away. Don't keep his beak particularly near your eyes. But if you keep carrying him around and cuddling him, he will turn into the best friend you ever had.
11:19 Speaker 04 So I know you've kept a bunch of different breeds over the years. Uh, do you have a favorite?
11:25 Speaker 03 Well, our first flock, um, they were entirely a breed called Black Sex Lynx. And one wonderful thing about Black Sex Lynx is that the chicks, you can tell just by looking at their color, which ones are gonna grow up to be ladies and which might be roosters. Because you don't wanna have a whole barnyard full of roosters. They will often fight if there are any hens at all. They are very jealous husbands. So that was pretty awesome. They, they were beautiful birds. They had, you know, red combs, upright combs, and they were very tolerant of the cold. And they laid delicious brown eggs.
12:08 Speaker 03 But later we had some other breeds, including Lakenvelders, which is, um, it's a word that means a shadow on a sheet. And they were white with, uh, beautiful black markings on their tail feathers and their wings. And we had Dominique's, uh, a heritage breed related to the, the barred rock. I, I never actually met a chicken I didn't like.
12:33 Speaker 04 So you've obviously thought about chickens quite a bit. Uh, what's your favorite chicken fact?
12:40 Speaker 03 I think any of, of the facts about how smart they are, that they can remember 100 faces. Um, that each one has their own personality and that.
12:53 Speaker 03 That their social lives are exquisitely important to them. Belonging to a flock is what matters. And this is something that really matters in human life, too. It's something that we admire and we should recognize it in these chickens, rather than dismiss them as these stupid, dirty, feathered automatons. Nothing could be further from the truth.
13:17 Flora Lichtman? Absolutely. Si, thank you so much for joining us.
13:20 Speaker 03 Oh, it was my pleasure.
13:22 Flora Lichtman? Si Montgomery, author of the new book, What the Chicken Knows: A New Appreciation of the World's Most Familiar Bird. She's based in Hancock, New Hampshire. If you want to see some pictures of Si's chickens, which I definitely do, go to sciencefriday.com/chicken. That's sciencefriday.com/chicken.
13:44 Speaker 02 After the break, how old snapshots of Antarctica could help scientists mine for valuable ecology data? Stay with us.
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16:48 Speaker 04 We've got a few minutes left, so how about we take a quick little trip to Antarctica? If you're lucky enough to make it down there, you'll probably aim to snag a classic photo op, a colony of hundreds of penguins set against the barren landscape. Countless versions of that picture taken over the years could turn out to be a valuable source of ecology data. That's thanks to a technique described this week in the journal PLOS One. It uses a computer model to pinpoint those images to a specific location in the Antarctic habitat. Joining me now to talk about it is Dr. Heather Lynch. She's the Institute for Advanced Computational Science endowed professor of ecology and evolution at Stony Brook University, and she studies penguins in Antarctica.
17:33 Speaker 04 Welcome to Science Friday.
17:34 Speaker 07 Oh, thank you for having me.
17:35 Speaker 04 So, first of all, would you describe sort of your standard penguin colony for us?
17:40 Speaker 07 Oh, sure. I'm not sure there is a standard one because actually they range quite a bit in size. So, some might only be a couple dozen penguins, and some of them will have hundreds or thousands of penguins nesting there. So, it can be quite variable, and you could have just one species there or multiple species in the same location.
17:55 Speaker 04 This new approach lets you map out the boundaries of a penguin colony. How does it actually work?
18:01 Speaker 07 Sure. So, one of the big things that my lab has been focused on is trying to track how populations of penguins are changing over time in Antarctica. But scientists can only be in so many places at once, and yet we actually have a very large Antarctic tour industry, and every passenger to the Antarctic has a camera in their pocket. So, we wanted to find a way to harness all of this data that are being collected that otherwise we wouldn't have access to. So, the idea is that we would want to take a picture of a penguin colony that's taken from the ground and given no other information about the camera or where the picture was taken to extract the boundary of the penguin colony and to actually place that in three-dimensional
18:43 Speaker 07 space to figure out where on the world were the penguins so that we could compare that with a photo that was maybe taken by someone else three or five or 10 years later, and we could track how the population has changed between those two time periods.
18:56 Speaker 04 Very cool. So what does this approach give you that, you know, say a satellite image or pictures from a drone might not provide?
19:03 Speaker 07 Yeah, well, we are very invested in using both drones and satellites. Both are tremendous sources of information and have really revolutionized the way we study penguin colonies. But the drone imagery that we have in particular is only available from the last few years. And satellite imagery only really goes back maybe, you know, 10 or 15 years if we're talking about the highest resolution imagery that we're now using. So what we wanted to do was develop a method that would allow us to go back to historic photos of the Antarctic and locate those. We call it georeferencing. We want to georeference those images so that we could compare the data that we're collecting now from drones and satellites to those photographs that may have been taken before those other sources of data were available to scientists.
19:47 Speaker 04 We're talking about, you know, the changes in boundaries of penguin colonies. How much are they really changing in position over time?
19:54 Speaker 07 So one of the things that's remarkable about penguins is that they are very sight faithful. And we know that from comparing some historic air photo data from the earliest days of mapping Antarctica to satellite imagery now, that we know that the population, if there's the same number of penguins, they really are nesting in roughly the same locations as their parents and grandparents and great grandparents. But the populations unfortunately in Antarctica are changing quite a bit due to climate change and other threats. And so when the population is shrinking or growing, those are the changes that we can track now using photographs in addition to the other sources that we've talked about, such as drone imagery or satellites.
20:32 Speaker 04 Hmm. And I'm assuming that not every tourist penguin pic will work for this. So what do folks need to make sure is in the image to make sure that it's going to be useful?
20:43 Speaker 07 So you know, your classic close up photo of an individual penguin is not going to do us a lot of good because we won't have enough context to know where that penguin was. And at the same time, if it's too much of a landscape photo and the penguins are in the deep, deep distance, it's going to be too far away. So ideally, what we have is a photograph that shows enough of the colony that we can actually extract its boundary, but also enough of the context like ridges and coastline that it helps the computer models locate that image in sort of three dimensional space relative to our models of these islands.
21:16 Speaker 04 And are there any other, you know, limits on how well this can work? You know, does snow impact the data at all?
21:22 Speaker 07 Well, snow is a really interesting problem and one of the reasons why this has been such a challenge in the Antarctic. This idea of creating three dimensional models of locations based on photographs is actually not particularly new. And there's a word for that. It's called phototourism, where people take these ad hoc tourist photos and could reconstruct, say, you know, the city of of New York City. But in the Antarctic, we don't have buildings or other sharp edges that would make it easier for the computers to reconstruct the scene in three dimensions. And as you mentioned, the snow is constantly changing in the Antarctic. So every photograph taken of the Antarctic, even the same location, two days in a row, will look quite different. And so that's one of the reasons why this was a challenging computer vision problem,
22:05 Speaker 07 is how do we accommodate those those changes in what the scene looks like? And so we had to rely very much on the fact that the terrain is quite static. You know, the island's surface is not changing between days, even if a lot of the things on the surface, like the snow, is changing.
22:22 Speaker 04 Yeah, well, and speaking of, you know, the starkness of the landscape, could researchers potentially use this in locations where there's more going on visually, you know, trees, vegetation?
22:34 Speaker 07 Absolutely. And in some ways, what we've done is solved the hard version of the problem. And I think other locations on the planet will be easier than the Antarctic. So, for example, one of the areas where I'm most interested in applying this, or I think it could make the biggest difference, would be in georeferencing photographs of glaciers. So if we think about, well, how are the glaciers of the Alps changing through time? This kind of approach would allow us to take photographs from climbers through the decades and to georeference them on the the earth, so we could see how the glacier had been changing over decades. Or another application would be looking at the location of flowers in a field. If we wanted to know the timing of flowering, or how a particular species of flower had
23:17 Speaker 07 been changing over time, we could use photographs taken from people going to, say, national parks, and we could use the same process there. So it's quite a general. Problem that we've solved, but it turns out that in places like the Antarctic, where we don't have a lot of visual cues that would allow us to figure out where a camera was when it took the photograph. That was the computer science challenge that we were trying to solve. And so this allows us to use it not just in the Antarctic, but pretty much everywhere else where you might have a little bit more information about where you are.
23:46 Speaker 04 You know, I think a lot of people listening to this will be really interested in how their photos today can be useful for research. But could you theoretically, you know, go back to a scan from an old textbook or encyclopedia and use that picture to pull useful information?
24:02 Speaker 07 Absolutely. The estimates are now that there are five billion pictures taken every day. But people didn't just start taking photographs. You know, people have been taking photographs of the planet for a hundred years. And so one of the challenges that environmental scientists face is trying to match the current conditions to those conditions that existed before all the the modern data collection that we have now. And so these historic photos that might be in a textbook or it might be in a in a museum somewhere. They provide this picture of what the planet looked like before the climate change impacts that we're seeing now. So it's really looking back at this archival imagery that I think this approach that we've developed here would be most useful.
24:45 Speaker 04 And what kind of research questions could you try to answer using these older photo sources?
24:50 Speaker 07 In the Antarctic in particular, we're very interested in how the ice environment has changed both the the depth of the snow, but in particular, the retreat of certain glaciers. We can look at volcanic processes that might have changed the the shape of the landscape. We can look at the spread of vegetation. So there was a really nice paper that was published recently by another group that was talking about the greening of Antarctica. Those are exactly the kinds of questions that we can start to to ask now, going back to the historic imagery, because we can say, oh, here's an image from 1967 or 1985. That plant is not in this location. And we know that because we have a photograph that we can place in real space. And we can see that that plant is not there 60 years ago, but it is there now.
25:35 Speaker 04 And getting back to penguins, I know your lab has another approach for tracking their movements, which is looking at their poop from space. Could you tell us a little bit more about that?
25:46 Speaker 07 Sure. So, one of the ways that my lab is studying penguins is actually to use satellite imagery, but we're not using satellite imagery to see individual penguins. What we're doing is actually looking at the poop stain that these colonies create on the landscape, and that can be seen from 400 miles away up in space, which is pretty remarkable. So, a lot of my research effort is focused on using computer science tools, computer vision and AI, to automate the search for penguins in that satellite image and to use it to actually track their abundance through time.
26:17 Speaker 04 And what is the, the big goal here? You know, why is it important to know where penguin colonies are getting to?
26:24 Speaker 07 Well, these penguin populations are changing rapidly, and we know that is due to a variety of factors that include climate change, but also fishing. We have a large Antarctic tourism industry. These are all of the factors that we're tracking that might be explaining why we're seeing declines in some species, we're seeing growth in other species. The Antarctic Peninsula is one of the most rapidly warming places on the planet, and we really see that reflected in the Antarctic penguins and their distribution and abundance. So, we are using them in many ways as like the canary in the coal mine for the Antarctic ecosystem, because we know the ecosystem is changing rapidly, and the penguins are telling us, they're giving us a window into that world.
27:05 Speaker 04 Very cool. Well, that's all the time we have for now. Dr. Heather Lynch is the Institute for Advanced Computational Science, endowed professor of ecology and evolution at Stony Brook University in Stony Brook, New York. Thanks so much for joining us.
27:20 Speaker 07 Oh, it was my pleasure.
27:24 Speaker 02 That's it for today. Tomorrow, we'll check in on some of the top stories from the week in science. Lots of folks help make this show happen every day, including
27:31 Speaker 05 Emma Gomez. Sandy Roberts.
27:34 Speaker 07 Robin Casmer. Kathleen Davis.
27:36 Speaker 02 I'm Charles Berkowitz. Thanks for listening. We'll see you soon.
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