Jennifer Ackerman Quotes

• “Being in nature refreshes us by ... allowing us to surrender to involuntary attention: the effortless and often enjoyable noticing of sensory stimuli in our environment.”

  Jennifer Ackerman

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• “قد يبدو اكتشاف مصدر الصوت وتفسيره عملا سهلا، لكنّه عمل معقد جدا؛ فعندما نسمع شخصا ما ينادينا باسمنا ونتجه نحو الصوت، فنحن نعول على قدرة دماغنا على حساب الاتجاه من الفارق الزمني بين الأذنين؛ وهو الفرق في الزمن الذي يستغرقه الصوت للوصول إلى أذنينا.”

  Jennifer Ackerman

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• “لقد تسبب توماس أديسون، أكثر من أي شخص آخر، بتراجع الظلام ونقص الأحلام.”

  Jennifer Ackerman

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• “If you happened to find yourself at the foot of the stairs in the White House on a typical afternoon sometime around 1804 or 1805, you might have noticed a perky bird in a pearl-gray coat ascending the steps behind Thomas Jefferson, hop by hop, as the president retired to his chambers for a siesta. This was Dick. Although the president didn’t dignify his pet mockingbird with one of the fancy Celtic or Gallic names he gave his horses and sheepdogs—Cucullin, Fingal, Bergère—still it was a favorite pet. “I sincerely congratulate you on the arrival of the Mocking bird,” Jefferson wrote to his son-in-law, who had informed him of the advent of the first resident mockingbird. “Learn all the children to venerate it as a superior being in the form of a bird.” Dick may well have been one of the two mockingbirds Jefferson bought in 1803. These were pricier than most pet birds ($10 or $15 then—around $125 now) because their serenades included not only renditions of all the birds of the local woods, but also popular American, Scottish, and French songs. Not everyone would pick this bird for a friend. Wordsworth called him the “merry mockingbird.” Brash, yes. Saucy and animated. But merry? His most common call is a bruising tschak!—a kind of unlovely avian expletive that one naturalist described as a cross between a snort of disgust and a hawking of phlegm. But Jefferson adored Dick for his uncommon intelligence, his musicality, and his remarkable ability to mimic. As the president’s friend Margaret Bayard Smith wrote, “Whenever he was alone he opened the cage and let the bird fly about the room. After flitting for a while from one object to another, it would alight on his table and regale him with its sweetest notes, or perch on his shoulder and take its food from his lips.” When the president napped, Dick would sit on his couch and serenade him with both bird and human tunes.”

  Jennifer Ackerman

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• “Tempting as it may be to interpret the behavior of other animals in terms of human mental processes, it's perhaps even more tempting to reject the possibility of kinship. It's what primatologist Frans de Waal calls "anthropodenial," blindness to humankind characteristics of other species,"Those who are in anthropodenial," says de Waal, "try to build a brick wall to separate humans from the rest of the animal kingdom.”

  Jennifer Ackerman

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• “وهنا، يمكن القول بأن هناك معيارا جديدا للشخصية وإمكانية بناء الصداقة: تثاءب وراقب من الذي تجاوب معك بالتثاؤب.”

  Jennifer Ackerman

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• “In scoping out the party crowd, does one face catch your eye? The Tierra del Fuegans have an expression, mamihlapinatapei, which is listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the world's mist succinct word. It refers to the act of 'looking into each other's eyes, each hoping that the other will initiate what both want to do but neither chooses to commence.”

  Jennifer Ackerman

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• “I can't imagine pressing on relentlessly through day and night with mind, body, spirit in a single state, can't imagine denying myself the possibility of a fresh start.”

  Jennifer Ackerman

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• “If a bird’s hair cells are damaged by disease or loud noises—say, by the blasting decibels of a rock concert in a domed stadium—they can regenerate. Ours can’t.)”

  Jennifer Ackerman

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• “Birds are facing change on a scale unknown in their evolutionary history. This is a result of the Anthropocene—the new epoch of man-made change that is contributing to what has been called the sixth mass extinction.”

  Jennifer Ackerman

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• “If one of the species you’re using in your experiment fails every test you give it, the problem may be you, the researcher, not the animal. You may have failed to understand what is relevant to the way a bird sees the world.”

  Jennifer Ackerman

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• “I love this idea, that nature dreamed up the same kind of sleep in both humans and birds, fostering the growth of big brains in creatures so far apart on life’s tree.”

  Jennifer Ackerman

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• “Each spring the robins nesting in our cherry tree attack the side mirror of our car as if it were a rival, pecking furiously at their own reflections while streaking the door with guano. But who among us hasn’t been toppled by our vanity or made an enemy of our own image?”

  Jennifer Ackerman

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• “AS A HUMAN BEING,” Einstein once wrote, “one has been endowed with just enough intelligence to be able to see clearly how utterly inadequate that intelligence is when confronted with what exists.”

  Jennifer Ackerman

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• “A frigate bird with a seven-foot wingspan has a skeleton that weighs less than its feathers.”

  Jennifer Ackerman

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• “. It’s a natural human impulse”

  Jennifer Ackerman

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• “Surprising,” says Lefebvre, “but reassuring in a way: At least we found one test that grassquits do well. If one of the species you’re using in your experiment fails every test you give it, the problem may be you, the researcher, not the animal. You may have failed to understand what is relevant to the way a bird sees the world.”

  Jennifer Ackerman

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• “It seemed to Whish that any potential crack was worth trying to open,” wrote the scientists. “Even a person’s face was not sacrosanct. He would fly to the face and clutch hole on the nose arch. He would then hang upside down and peer into the nostrils.”

  Jennifer Ackerman

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• “He taught me the difference between casual “birdwatching” and the more intense, focused “birding,” and urged me to go beyond identifying birds to noting their actions and behavior.”

  Jennifer Ackerman

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• “What kind of intelligence allows a bird to anticipate the arrival of a distant storm? Or find its way to a place it has never been before, though it may be thousands of miles away? Or precisely imitate the complex songs of hundreds of other species? Or hide tens of thousands of seeds over hundreds of square miles and remember where it put them six months later? (I would flunk these sorts of intelligence tests as readily as birds might fail mine.)”

  Jennifer Ackerman

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• “Instead, each bird is interacting with up to seven close neighbors, making individual movement decisions based on maintaining velocity and distance from fellow flock members and copying how sharply a neighbor turns, so that a group of, say, four hundred birds can veer in another direction in a little over half a second. What emerges is almost instantaneous ripples of movement in what appears to be one living curtain of bird.”

  Jennifer Ackerman

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• “It’s a notion that was proposed three decades ago by Jane Goodall and her colleague Hans Kummer. The pair made a plea for measuring a wild animal’s intelligence by looking at its ability to find solutions to problems in its natural setting. What’s needed is an ecological rather than a laboratory measure of intelligence, they suggested. This can be found in an animal’s ability to innovate in its own environment, “to find a solution to a novel problem, or a novel solution to an old one.”

  Jennifer Ackerman

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• “In the 1990s, reports began to roll in from New Caledonia, a small island in the South Pacific, of crows that fashion their own tools in the wild and appear to transmit local styles of toolmaking from one generation to the next—a feat reminiscent of human culture and proof that sophisticated tool skills do not require a primate brain.”

  Jennifer Ackerman

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• “this whiff of tissue harbors our mental maps—and our memories. In fact, our recollections appear to be all bound up with where we experienced an event.”

  Jennifer Ackerman

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• “MIGRATION IS ANOTHER TRADE-OFF. Birds that migrate have smaller brains than their sedentary relatives. This makes sense, as a brain that consumes a lot of energy and develops slowly would be too costly for birds that travel a lot.”

  Jennifer Ackerman

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