Chris Zell <chrisz...@wetmtv.com> wrote: It is always difficult for me to accept that the living world constantly > needs our intervention, as if the whole of adaptive evolution never took > place - including dramatic catastrophes. >
Well, natural catastrophes wiped out entire species. We don't want that to happen because of our technology. Generally speaking, as long as the effect from technology is not too destructive, and it resembles some natural effect, animals will adjust to it. As I said, birds will avoid large wind turbine blades because they resemble moving trees. They will not avoid reflective plate glass because nothing like that exists in nature. Water is reflective, but not horizontal, or high up in the sky. > Rupert Sheldrake once claimed that some small birds learned to attack > products delivered by the milkman- clearly within historical times. > That is a widely reported event. A species in the UK called the blue tit learned how to open milk bottles and drink the cream. This was before milk was homogenized. The problem was, the birds would drink down too far, get stuck, and drown. There were many reports of dead birds sticking out of bottles. Then, suddenly, over a few months, that stopped happening. The birds learned to drink only from the top, and leave the rest. Somehow they communicated the technique to other blue tits all over England, because it stopped happening everywhere. Another extraordinary aspect of this was that the birds remembered how to do this for 10 years when there were no milk bottles. Home delivery of milk was curtailed during WWII until the 1950s. When bottles were again delivered, the birds went back to drinking from them, without getting drowned. Several generations of birds somehow passed down the knowledge from their great-grandparents, even though they never saw a milk bottle. Animals are a lot smarter than we realize. On the other hand, other bird species never learned to open the bottles or drink from them. It seems the blue tits particularly love the taste of milk. - Jed
