Country sights and sounds
John Shelley
A dark shadow flickered over the ground, sending our newly arrived chickens into a cackling panic. The passage of a hen harrier over their heads was too much for them to contemplate. It made me think once more on the question of inherited memory, something naturalists have pondered for a long while. Could there be such a thing?
Our chickens are just youngsters that came to stay with us after we found them crammed into a crate at a car boot sale. They had looked blind-hearted. Oh, they could see alright, with their eyes, that is, but there was nothing more to them than feathers and flesh, each of them no more dissimilar to its neighbours than it had been as an egg.
We knew better. Given the opportunity and circumstance, even these fuddle-brained birds had the potential to develop its own personality. We chose four that looked to be the brightest of the bunch, handed over our cash and took our new friends home.
Within days they began to change, and as each emerged from its factory-bred anonymity the family ascribed names to each one. There is Ginger, the escape artist, who can surmount a four-foot fence with ease, despite having her flight feathers clipped back to the quill, and Bakewell, who is fat and ponderous and not at all bothered about getting out of her pen. She appears disinclined to engage in the business of egg production. Her contribution to the table might yet be made in one final and terrible moment. ‘Watch and learn’ we tell her, pointing to her companions squeezing eggs out faster than we can use them.
The functional and unimaginative Beverly Coopbuster and Babs, named after the star of the greatest film on poultry ever made, Chicken Run, (My life flashed before my eyes. It was really boring.’) make up the quartet.
But enough of that and back to the question of inherited memory. How do our hens, which were hatched and raised in artificial conditions and have never met their parents or had any education, equate the arrival of a hen harrier with danger? So they don’t behave as wild birds do – a pheasant or a snipe would crouch low to the ground and rely on camouflage as a protection. The chickens, meanwhile, couldn’t possibly have done more to draw attention to themselves, so much did they flap and cackle. There is no doubt, though, that they know well what harriers like to eat.
As it was, one of the ravens that lives in the woods had also seen the harrier and had determined to move it on. The hen harrier has a deceptively casual, languid fashion of flight, just doing enough to keep itself airborne, gliding slowly on broad, many-fingered wings. Yet given good reason to demonstrate its true ability it proves surprisingly agile. The heavy bill of the raven was reason enough. The raptor attempted at first to turn and face its aggressor, but then followed the course of wisdom and went to hunt elsewhere.
Even when the raptor was gone the raven stayed overhead, flying in wide circles and croaking loudly. The hens weren’t at all bothered. They soon forgot their primeval impulse and settled down once more, leaving me with my question. Why were they troubled by the appearance of the harrier but not by the presence of the equally large raven?
One researcher found that when a hawk-shaped kite was flown with its head to the wind it caused panic among birds on the ground, but when the same kite was flown tail to the wind, to create a slightly different silhouette, the same birds took no notice. Those birds might have learned about predators through their own experience; our hens most certainly had not.
We heard the cuckoo calling recently. He has just got back from his African holiday home, to entertain us for the next few weeks. Come the end of July he will be off once more. His offspring, which will be raised by foster parents, will not get to meet him until they too go to the same parts of the African continent. The difficulty lies in this: the young cuckoos will not leave here until late August, about a month after their parents have gone. Now, how do they know which way to go without someone to guide them? Inherited memory?
