Author speaks about ties between birds and man

Award-winning author Jim Robbins of Helena was at the Havre-Hill County Library Thursday evening for the library's Winter Reading Series to talk about his book "The Wonder of Birds."

Speaking to about 30 attendees, Robbins said he looked at a variety of bird topics from bird evolution to how they have fed humans, ways science is studying them to better understand humans and how they can help improve human interaction. He tried, he said, to approach all his research guided by a set of philosophical questions.

"What do birds tell us about the world we live in if we ask the right questions?" he said.

People ask questions about bird songs, bird brains and the evolution of dinosaurs into birds, Robbins said, but maybe they aren't asking the right questions. With his book, he added, he tried to address the philosophical connections between that knowledge and the lessons humans can learn from them to live as better people.

"The questions we ask dictate the answers we get," he said. "And I think that the natural world is a lot more important than what our science tells us."

Humans studied birds and learned how to fly and fly more efficiently, he said, but they also have studied such things as indicator birds to learn about ecosystems.

The black-backed woodpecker, which is found in Montana, he said, comes into a forest after a fire to eat a beetle that is attracted to the burnt wood. If the woodpeckers disappear from an area, that indicates a change in the local ecosystem.

Do connections exist between seemingly unconnected things, as quantum theory would suggest? he asked. This might explain such mysteries as bird migration and the undulating clouds of birds called murmurations, but understanding these mysteries might also give mankind better understanding of other mysteries.

"Do we live in a quantum world?" he asked.

One researcher's study of how penguins can dive as deep as 1,500 feet into water that is at subzero temperatures could help humans to survive in more extreme environments or recover from extreme medical stress, such as strokes, heart attacks or vascular disease.

One of the problems, the researcher pointed out, is that of the 18 penguins species 11 are in decline, and if the birds die out, the lessons to be learned, from them die, too.

Robbins said he also looked at what humans can learn about themselves through the study of birds.

The white-fronted bee-eater, a colorful bird of Kenya, has a strong sense of family, he said. Studies on the dynamics of interaction between multiple generations of bee-eaters, including step-family members, have helped inform family therapists about driving forces in their clients' family issues.

Some studies, Robbins said, show that birds might be capable of complex thought and emotion.

"Imagine how the world might change - we talked about chickens and how they're slaughtered and so on - if we thought these animals had an emotional life," he said.

"There may be, to birds, a totally different way of experiencing the world than we have here in our culture. If that's true, if it is, I think that's really important," he said.

"That's what I'm getting at here with raising these questions, and other people have raised, about maybe the world is a very different place than we think," he added. "We should understand it before we destroy it."

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Originally from Niagara Falls, New York, Jim Robbins migrated west in the late 1970s, traveling with his future wife first to Texas, which he said they did not like, then north until they reached Helena in 1977.

Robbins parlayed his journalism degree with a science minor into a long-standing career as a freelance writer.

He has been a contributor to The New York Times for 35 years and has written for other magazines, such as Audubon, Smithsonian, Vanity Fair and Conde Nast Traveler. Though he writes primarily on environmental science topics, which he has researched around the world, Robbins said that as the Times’ contact in the west he has covered a variety of stories, including Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber.

Winner of the 2017 Montana Book Award for “The Wonder of Birds,” Robbins also authored “The Man Who Planted Trees,” “Last Refuge” and “A Symphony in the Brain,” and co-authored “The Open-Focus Brain” and “Dissolving Pain.”