Sandra Milligan has been teaching biology at North Island College, in Campbell River, for more than 20 years. She is an avid birder with deep roots in her local community. Someone from Sierra Quadra came to lecture she gave on bird intelligence, at ElderCollege in Campbell River, last fall. This led to Sierra Quadra inviting Milligan to speak at the Quadra Community Centre at 7:30  PM in Saturday, March 2. 

“Birds are incredibly intelligent, contrary to what science has believed in the past.  They understand what each other is thinking. One of my favourite topics, because I’m a bird watcher, (aka a bird listener) is to talk about bird communication and language. They can have hundreds (and thousands even) of different vocalizations and they really communicate in much more depth than science previously believed to be happening,” she explained.  

Cortes Currents: I’m especially after stories of local birds. I don’t know how familiar you are with Cortes Island, but we have two annual bird counts. One at Christmas, and another in the spring. I will be checking the species you mention in your stories against our lists, to see how applicable they are to our area.

Milligan would later describe Campbell River’s Christmas Bird Counts. They extend over a wide area which includes most of the South End of Quadra Island. Consequently, they have been seeing more species in their Christmas counts  Cortes Island’s Christmas Count. In December 2023, for example, they recorded 87 species to our 67. In 2022, the numbers were 94 to 54, respectively.    

Sandra Milligan: “There are lots of really neat stories, but Ravens and Chickadees are about as common as it gets and those are two species that I am going to talk about.”

 “Corvids is the whole group of Crows and Ravens and jays. They have been demonstrated to be some of the most intelligent animals. I think that means in part that they’re the most amenable to experimentation and working with humans, which of course is one of the challenges. Humans really can understand best the species that they can communicate with in some way or form.”  

“There are lots of stories of Ravens flying over people and squawking at them. Basically  acting in a way where people are like, ‘Oh, those Ravens are making me think that there’s something weird going on and it’s making me feel uncomfortable.” People start looking around their environment and trying to figure out what the Ravens are trying to communicate with them and then see something like a Cougar nearby. They then  go inside  their cabin or remove themselves from the area and  think, ‘geez, if it wasn’t for those Ravens, I might have been attacked by a Cougar. Isn’t that great that the Ravens signaled to me that I needed to be careful.’” 

“But in fact, when you look at this with an evolutionary lens, that’s not who the Ravens were communicating with at all. Ravens typically cannot break skin and get in to eat the meat of an animal. They need a predator to do that for them.” 

“First Nations people know that Ravens and wolves work together. The Ravens tell the wolves where the prey is, so the predator can get the prey. Then the Raven can get the dinner. So in these stories where people come away thinking, ‘wow, that Raven saved my life’ the Raven was trying to help end your life so they could maybe have a meal.”

Cortes Currents: Tell us another story. 

Sandra Milligan: “In some recent research, scientists developed a taxidermied robotic owl.  They had this thing in a tree where it could be basically covered by a canopy,  but then they could raise it, so it would become visible at the top of a tree.  They had microphones set up throughout the forest in a radial pattern to capture vocalizations.”  

“What they found was that there is tremendous interspecies communication. Most species recognize alarm calls of other species.  When a predator appears, there is this bubble of alarm calls that proceeds outwards at a speed faster than that predator can fly. When a hawk or an owl moves into an area, there’s this burst of alarm calls that move ahead of it, so that its cover is blown before it gets anywhere. Everybody already knows that it’s on its way.” 

Cortes Currents: Are you saying the squirrels understand the call too?

Sandra Milligan: “Yes, squirrels also have alarm calls. They will participate in this bubble of noise that proceeds in advance.” 

“There are different sounds.”

“Within Chickadees, for example  (not our Chestnut-backed Chickadees, but, the ‘Black-capped Chickadees,’ who make the classic ‘chickadee, dee, dee, dee’) – the more dees, the more threatening the predator. For Chickadees, small hawks, which are more important predators of small birds,  get more Ds than larger hawks and owls that tend to capture larger birds.  Their language has meaning. They have a different call for a predator that’s low down compared to a predator that’s high up. That’s all language, essentially.” 

Cortes Currents: On Cortes, we have a population of over a thousand people and about 3,000 birds are usually seen during the Christmas bird counts. 

Cortes Currents: Are you talking about Campbell River and Quadra Island as well as Cortes?  

Sandra Milligan: “Yes, and there is lots of seasonal variation. There were 400 Western grebes in the south of the Twin Islands last week, which I would have loved to have seen. You have tons and tons  (thousands) of Surf scoters around right now, but they’ll disappear in the summer, and then you’ll have all the songbirds come in.  So different species of birds, as the seasons go.” 

Sandra Milligan: “When we think about the ocean, there aren’t any artificial boundaries, Birds move depending on what’s happening. For example,  in the next week or two you’re going to lose your Surf scoters and your gulls. They’re all going to go south to Hornby Island because the herring spawn is imminent. In the next day or two,  tens of thousands of gulls and Surf scoters will move down to the north end of Hornby and Denman to eat the herring.”

“Your birds aren’t your birds all the time. Our summer songbirds are Mexico and South America’s winter birds.” 

Cortes Currents: Have you noticed any changes in the migration patterns of the birds? 

Sandra Milligan: “It’s more a matter of timing, that’s probably the most noticeable thing.  For example,  people have been reporting Turkey Vultures, which we wouldn’t normally see until the 1st of March, but people have been seeing them since the beginning of February.  Barn swallows were here a month ago, which is unheard of at this time of year.”

“We’re social animals and I’m really fortunate to be connected with other birders who love to share this information.  The things we’re talking about right now is: ‘Are the herring coming? What’s the earliest day that we would expect the herring to show up?’” 

“This year there were virtually no White-winged Crossbills. Last year there was a huge eruption. They were all over. If you went out in the forest, you were going to see them pretty much all winter last year.” 

Cortes Currents: She believes there are fewer Crossbills this year because  of a scarsity of Douglas Fir cones.

Sandra Milligan: The hypothesis is that they haven’t produced as much seed, so the Crossbills don’t have anything to eat here and haven’t stayed here, but I don’t know that that’s been tested in any way.”

Cortes Currents: We started talking about bird counts after that. Campbell River and the Comox Valley have had them for decades. 

Sandra Milligan: “I did my first one almost 20 years ago and the couple who mentored me and that first outing are still doing the count in their area. We have some of the same people who come out every year.” 

“It’s a great day, better when it’s not horizontal rain, but it’s a relatively short day because we’re burning from dawn to dusk.  We try to cover as much of our area as we can and basically just count as many species as we can.  Much of  which is done  by ear, but of course Campbell River has this extended oceanfront,  so many of the areas also include lots of seabirds and shorebirds.” 

“Christmas and spring bird counts are really, really valuable. It’s great citizen science and most communities have them and  it is really valuable to look at from year to year.  One thing we do after our Christmas bird count is chat about how these numbers are different from last year, or the last few years.” 

“Now we’ve got ebird, which is a wonderful citizen science tool that collects data worldwide. It has provided ornithologists with a wonderful amount of data where they make these beautiful maps that show  the seasonal changes in bird populations.  You can watch  a little 10 second video that shows the red colour in South America of our songbirds and how that colour disappears. They are basically  a visual way of depicting how the numbers move across migration seasons in the spring and fall. It’s really neat. I recommend checking that out on eBird.”  

“There is  an underlying story here outside of the content of bird intelligence. I am getting a little older and I am a scientist by training, but a public educator by profession. So I’ve read a ton of the history of science. The underlying story that I hope to leave people with is that  science is very young  and Western culture and Western science for the last few hundred years has really held humans in this kind of special domain where we supposedly can do things that other species can’t.”  

“Thinking that animals can think, or animals have consciousness, or that animals feel and animals care about each other: that was scientific taboo until basically the 1980s. If you gave your experimental animals a name, that was considered a bad thing and non scientific.  Jane Goodall and others were given a hard time for giving their experimental animals names and anthropomorphizing.  Over the last few decades  we’ve broken down these barriers where humans have thought we were the big deal. Cognitive scientists and evolutionary scientists have now put animals up on that pedestal with humans.”

“There is virtually nothing we do that there isn’t some comparable intelligence in animals and specifically in birds.  What I would like to think is that as we move forward into the future, we think more about the animals around us to appreciate what they can do to recognize that there are many different forms of intelligence.”

Links of Interest:

• Why Crows Are As Smart as a 7-year old by Real Science (Video) 
• Tool making crows are even smarter than we thought (Video)
• Birds Canada website
• articles about Cortes Island’s Christmas and Spring Bird Counts.

Top image credit: Ravens chasing a Bald Eagle – USFWS photo: Kennith King via Flickr (Public Domain)

Sign-up for Cortes Currents email-out:

To receive an emailed catalogue of articles on Cortes Currents, send a (blank) email to subscribe to your desired frequency:

• Daily, (articles posted during the last 24 hours) – cortescurrents-daily+subscribe@cortes.groups.io
• Weekly Digest cortescurrents – cortescurrents-weekly+subscribe@cortes.groups.io