Little green bee eater bird is a delightful bird. This slender bird is a riot of colors predominately shades of green and a delicate elo
ngated central tail feather. They eat insects and ants, constant nuisance if you are a bee keeper but then I am not a bee keeper and yes even if I am I wouldn’t mind!. These birds hunt from low perches and are ever active. The Collins Birds of India (Martin Woodwock) the one I carry has an amazingly accurate description about this bird “often seen perched on posts, where the birds line up side by side, constantly changing places as first one, then another launches out after an insect”. This is the just how I saw these birds!. The book is incredible, and quite handy. Strongly suggested for anyone venturing into bird watching. Bee-eater birds are diverse and abundantly found throughout Sub Sahara and Africa and Asia. They are usually seen in small groups but little green bee eaters are known to be solitary nesters, they nest in hollows in vertical mud banks. Their call is soft trill.
Do Little Green Bee-eater have theory of mind?
This is the question B. Smitha, Juilee Thakar and Milind Watve (of Department of Microbiology, Abasaheb Garware College and Life Research Foundation at Pune, India) delved upon in their research paper. It is an interesting piece of study and this is a paragraph from their paper, please read carefully it is an amazing understanding on these birds and shows how perceptive these tiny little birds are:
Theory of mind, or the ability to think about another individual’s mental states, is not widely known in animals. We describe in this paper a test for the theory of mind in birds and present suggestive evidence for theory of mind in
the small green bee eater. Bee eaters were observed to hesitate entering their nest in the presence of a human observer. The hesitation was significantly reduced when the observer was unable to see the nest, although the bird could see the observer clearly and at a comparable distance. This suggests that the birds can appreciate the visual perspective of the observer and take a decision based on the observer’s vision. Further, if the observer had seen the nest before in the presence of the bird, the frequency of nest visits was observed to be less than that when the observer had not seen the nest, suggesting that the bird can probably differentiate what the observer knows and what he does not. Such a behavior needs a mental capacity so far only known in humans and a few other primates.
The pictures of the birds were taken at Auroville, Pondicherry, TN on my morning walks. There are many more I have clicked will put in subsequent blogs. Happy reading!!.
Auroville is a great place to be in, calm and self contained, having really nothing to do with the world. I stayed in a cottage for 3to4 days (no news, no net was really a help, except once I had to visit the net few Km down, as part of my job as also thought of posting one silly poem I wrote in the train!). Auroville is spread across acres of pristine forest land. This blogger is a habitual morning walker except in cities (apart from pollution I dislike the sight of people walking as part of exercising). I love walking when the surrounding is agreeable. Indeed I walked about 10km from the main road to the Auroville visiting centre with my heavy bag (a decade back too I did the same thing, this time though I had the camera with new lens). Auroville is bird watchers delight, I though was expecting to find a book on Birds at Auroville but couldn’t.
The Stamp herein is fro
m Jordan and the painting by Neville Cayley (1886-1950). Cayley was the chief painter of Australian birds. His most distinctive and influential work was done through the medium of books. The first of these was What Bird is That? (1931), in which every Australian bird was illustrated in colour and which ran to many editions. Cayley's other chief works were Finches in Bush and Aviary (1932), Budgerigars in Bush and Aviary (1933), Australian Parrots (1938), and The Fairy Wrens of Australia (1949). In addition, Cayley executed the colour drawings for G. A Waterhouse's What Butterfly is That? (1932) and also the figures in E. Troughton's Furred Animals of Australia (1941).
ngated central tail feather. They eat insects and ants, constant nuisance if you are a bee keeper but then I am not a bee keeper and yes even if I am I wouldn’t mind!. These birds hunt from low perches and are ever active. The Collins Birds of India (Martin Woodwock) the one I carry has an amazingly accurate description about this bird “often seen perched on posts, where the birds line up side by side, constantly changing places as first one, then another launches out after an insect”. This is the just how I saw these birds!. The book is incredible, and quite handy. Strongly suggested for anyone venturing into bird watching. Bee-eater birds are diverse and abundantly found throughout Sub Sahara and Africa and Asia. They are usually seen in small groups but little green bee eaters are known to be solitary nesters, they nest in hollows in vertical mud banks. Their call is soft trill.Do Little Green Bee-eater have theory of mind?
This is the question B. Smitha, Juilee Thakar and Milind Watve (of Department of Microbiology, Abasaheb Garware College and Life Research Foundation at Pune, India) delved upon in their research paper. It is an interesting piece of study and this is a paragraph from their paper, please read carefully it is an amazing understanding on these birds and shows how perceptive these tiny little birds are:
Theory of mind, or the ability to think about another individual’s mental states, is not widely known in animals. We describe in this paper a test for the theory of mind in birds and present suggestive evidence for theory of mind in
the small green bee eater. Bee eaters were observed to hesitate entering their nest in the presence of a human observer. The hesitation was significantly reduced when the observer was unable to see the nest, although the bird could see the observer clearly and at a comparable distance. This suggests that the birds can appreciate the visual perspective of the observer and take a decision based on the observer’s vision. Further, if the observer had seen the nest before in the presence of the bird, the frequency of nest visits was observed to be less than that when the observer had not seen the nest, suggesting that the bird can probably differentiate what the observer knows and what he does not. Such a behavior needs a mental capacity so far only known in humans and a few other primates. The pictures of the birds were taken at Auroville, Pondicherry, TN on my morning walks. There are many more I have clicked will put in subsequent blogs. Happy reading!!.
Auroville is a great place to be in, calm and self contained, having really nothing to do with the world. I stayed in a cottage for 3to4 days (no news, no net was really a help, except once I had to visit the net few Km down, as part of my job as also thought of posting one silly poem I wrote in the train!). Auroville is spread across acres of pristine forest land. This blogger is a habitual morning walker except in cities (apart from pollution I dislike the sight of people walking as part of exercising). I love walking when the surrounding is agreeable. Indeed I walked about 10km from the main road to the Auroville visiting centre with my heavy bag (a decade back too I did the same thing, this time though I had the camera with new lens). Auroville is bird watchers delight, I though was expecting to find a book on Birds at Auroville but couldn’t. The Stamp herein is fro
m Jordan and the painting by Neville Cayley (1886-1950). Cayley was the chief painter of Australian birds. His most distinctive and influential work was done through the medium of books. The first of these was What Bird is That? (1931), in which every Australian bird was illustrated in colour and which ran to many editions. Cayley's other chief works were Finches in Bush and Aviary (1932), Budgerigars in Bush and Aviary (1933), Australian Parrots (1938), and The Fairy Wrens of Australia (1949). In addition, Cayley executed the colour drawings for G. A Waterhouse's What Butterfly is That? (1932) and also the figures in E. Troughton's Furred Animals of Australia (1941).
