The Psychology of Birds: An Interpretation of Bird Behavior by Harold E. Burtt (1967)

This book caught my interest while I was shelving. Its title is evocative – calling to mind old Sci Fi movies and odd experiments. The book itself is less of a scientific work than might be assumed by the title. It is more of a catalog of bird behavior, with assumptions for the causes of the behavior and anecdotal evidence to back-up those assumptions.

Burtt is careful to warn the reader that observed bird behaviors do not, in most cases, reflect the inner workings of a bird’s mind, nor even that the bird “thought” about its action. The tone throughout the book is of a gentle psychologist, carefully explaining complex theories in simple language to layfolk. 

Cover image: Books Illustrated by Peter Parnall, http://www.parnall.pagebooks.net/

 
Most of the book discusses a particular concept – sensations and perceptions, instincts, migrations, etc. – with a variety of particular behaviors illustrated. There is a lot of hemming, though, with Burtt stating that this “may” or “may not” be the psychology interpretation. For example, he explains why an observer needs to be critical in interpreting the bird behavior he sees:

In psychology we have a principle called the law of parsimony, which tempers such uncritical interpretation. It recommends that we should not explain the behavior by a higher-level process when we can interpret it adequately by a lower-level process. Suppose we see a house wren picking up a stick by one end and pulling it through the small entrance to his house rather than taking it by the middle and getting stuck with it across the hole. Ahah! The bird had insight into the geometry of the situation, figured that the length of the stick was greater than the diameter of the hole and acted accordingly. On the contrary, if we had been around earlier we would have seen him vainly holding sticks by the middle dozens of times and then eventually blundering into grasping one by the end and being rewarded by success; after many of these blunders and successes he finally learned how to do it. His “insight” actually was a rather low level of hit-and-miss learning (or trial-and-error, as we more frequently call it). That is the only safe explanation.

The first few chapters are an interesting read, but the formula does grow old. Some of the examples are repeated several times, so it can seem as though the material is simply being reused in later chapters. Perhaps the explosion of nature-oriented television shows also makes the text seem less special than it may have when first published.

There seems to have been a lot of interest in the book when first added to our collection. Though I’m not sure of the exact year of acquisition, the book was published in 1967 and its first checkout was in 1970. There were nine checkouts in the 70s, five in the 80s, two in the 90s, and most recently in 2008. I would imagine there would be a lot of interest from both specialists and amateur bird watchers.