Why did the eagle lay her eggs in grief and weep?
Answers
Explanation:
It’s hard to imagine what a mourning bird would look like. But forced to guess, I would say the footage of two female Emperor Penguins huddled around a lifeless chick in BBC’s series “Penguins-Spy in the Huddle” comes uncomfortably close:
The accompanying narration supports this conclusion: “The mother invested everything in her chick.” the BBC reporter intones. “To lose it is a tragedy.” Even the clip’s producers call this “the most emotional clip we’ve ever filmed.” But does the bird actually feel the same great sadness that the image evokes in us? It’s hard to tell—even for scientists.
“I don’t think this is evidence of mourning,” says John Marzluff, a professor of avian social ecology and wildlife science at the University of Washington. “I see a response to a chick that is not responding, so the mother keeps trying the typical things,” such as sliding her chick toward the brood patch—the bare belly skin that transfers a mother’s body heat to her baby—and vocalizing to wake the unresponsive infant.
But Barbara J. King, an anthropologist at the College of William and Mary and author of the 2013 book How Animals Grieve, sees things differently—to her, the mother’s nudging of the tiny body with her bill, the vocalizing, and the camaraderie of her female companion all hint at something akin to grief. But to be scientifically sure, she argues, it would need to last longer. In clear cases of grief, she says, “we should observe prolonged signs of altered behavior in the survivor.” But for Marzluff, proving grief would need to be measured through the vista of a brain scan: If the mother’s hippocampus—the region in bird brains that is comparable to the emotional hub in mammal brains—lights up, “that might indicate grief,” Marzluff says. It’s this kind of deep evidence, he argues, “that we need to make a rock solid interpretation.”