The Thing with Feathers (13 page)

People with lower resting heart rates generally live longer, which fits right in with the billion-heartbeat rule. This points to one of the many benefits of exercise. Going for a run might
speed up your heart for a short while, compressing more beats into a small amount of time, but it will also lower your resting heart rate as you get fitter, ultimately extending your life.

Slow down your baseline, in other words, and you’ll live longer.

Psychologists have demonstrated that the pace of life in large cities—how quickly post office transactions are processed, how much time a stranger will spend answering your question, how accurately bank clocks are set—is correlated with the speed of pedestrians on the sidewalk. In 1999, a psychology professor at California State University analyzed walking speed in cities from thirty-one different countries, and found that the pace of life was fastest in Japan and western European nations, and slowest in economically undeveloped countries. People moved more quickly in colder climates and in “individualistic cultures.” Faster cities had significantly higher rates of smoking and heart disease. Switzerland was fastest. Mexico was slowest.

In 2007, a separate study found that the differences in walking speed among countries could be dramatic. Residents of Singapore averaged 10.5 seconds to cover 60 feet of sidewalk, while people in Bahrain took closer to 18 seconds to meander the same distance, and Malawi was off the scale at 31 seconds.

The same study also compared its measurements with data collected ten years earlier, and came up with a somewhat shocking result: In the previous decade, walking pace had increased by 10 percent overall. In the world’s largest cities, people were physically moving faster, averaging 3.27 miles per hour compared with 2.97 miles per hour just ten years earlier.

Are we becoming more like hummingbirds?

Hummers are so fragile that they leave few fossils, so our knowledge of their origins is punctuated by long gaps. We do
know that hummingbird-like creatures existed in what is now Germany about 30 million years ago, that they must have evolved most of their incredible adaptations for high-powered flight since then, and that they are most closely related to swifts and nightjars. As they gradually grew smaller and faster, their engines more refined, their equipment more specialized, hummingbirds became the miniature turbos that we admire today.

But their flight in the fast lane came at a high cost. If they ever pull over for a rest, they die of starvation. Their legs, shriveled up to save weight, are too weak to take even one step. Hummingbirds are slaves to speed, desperately fighting for control of calories, so single-minded that they don’t even partner up to raise a family. They apparently have an unusually high rate of heart attacks and ruptures, which is hardly surprising. Hummers blast through their billion heartbeats in one brilliantly intense rush, and when the engine shorts out, they fade just as quickly into aether, hardly leaving any trace to show that they ever existed at all.

It seems like humans are speeding up—we strive for more gratification with fewer delays. Our fast-food culture isn’t a cliché; it’s a fact. And things are only accelerating. But do we really want to become hummingbirds?

The famous golfer Walter Hagen, perhaps the first athlete ever to earn a million dollars, recognized the need to slow down once in a while. He might even have been pondering hummingbirds when he once quipped: “Don’t hurry. Don’t worry. And be sure to smell the flowers along the way.”

part two

MIND

FEAR

DANCING TO A BEAT

PECKING ORDER

MEMORY

fight or flight

WHAT PENGUINS ARE AFRAID OF

T
he first time I walked through the Adélie penguin colony at Cape Crozier, Antarctica, I quickly learned to step carefully. Researchers have scrutinized aerial photos and counted 300,000 penguins here—about the population of Pittsburgh—crammed into a single valley about one mile wide, next to the edge of the Ross Ice Shelf in a remote, frozen region claimed optimistically by New Zealand. The birds nest within pecking distance of one another, in swirling, dense swatches that, in satellite images, resemble a grainy photocopy of a Rorschach test. On the ground, it’s chaos. I found myself sidestepping along the edges of two-foot-tall crowds within the metropolis, detouring around stubborn penguins that wouldn’t get out of my way.

It was 20 degrees below zero Fahrenheit with a biting wind, and I wore a full polar kit: insulated white bunny boots, black snow pants, layers of long underwear that would not be changed for weeks at a time, rainbow-tinted ski goggles, and a red down jacket with its hood lined in coyote fur. The penguins regarded me like I’d just dropped in from outer space.

Personally, I’d be a bit frightened if a gigantic, multicolored alien suddenly appeared next to my house, but these birds weren’t afraid, despite having had relatively little human contact. They were simply curious, often approaching with timid steps if I paused quietly for a moment. Penguins untied my shoelaces, hesitatingly preened the sides of my sleek pants, and fell in line behind me in a drawn-out game of follow-the-leader. The followers stopped when I stopped, walked when I walked, and froze like a group of guilty thieves whenever I suddenly
turned on them. As I wound my way deeper into the valley, fifty penguins followed in a gaggle.

Such trust is remarkable in a wild creature; perhaps it helps explain the star appeal of penguins—why a bird in one of the world’s most remote places is also one of the most well-studied species on earth, and why, as the actor Joe Moore has been credited with observing, “it is practically impossible to look at a penguin and feel angry.” The arrival of humans hasn’t diminished the birds’ energetic personality. They are still as approachable today as they were when the first explorers stepped onto the Antarctic continent.

“They are extraordinarily like children, these little people of the Antarctic world,” wrote Apsley Cherry-Garrard, a twenty-five-year-old adventurer who visited Cape Crozier in 1911 during Robert Scott’s ill-fated South Pole expedition. “Their little bodies are so full of curiosity,” he observed, “that they have little room for fear.”

But even penguins have their limits, as I soon discovered. As part of a long-running research project called Penguin Science, I had been deployed to Cape Crozier with two other researchers to spend three months in a rough field camp—no shower, laundry, fresh food, or resupply. One of our most important goals was to track penguins with several biotelemetry global-positioning-system tags, recently designed, which could not only transmit their location in real time but also measure temperature, pressure, and light levels underwater. That meant that with a bit of luck, we would be able to visualize how the birds hunt for fish. First, though, someone had to go wrangle some penguins.

I usually tell people that catching a penguin is easy: You just walk over to one and pick it up. But this glosses over a certain wiliness on the part of the penguin. Yes, penguins are
extremely approachable, especially when on a nest; they will let you walk within two or three feet of them without much concern. Invade that bubble of personal space, though, and you’d better be quick. If you grab the feet with one hand, scooping under the belly, and hold the base of the tail in the other, you can have the penguin contained in your lap before it realizes what’s happening.

Attaching a global-positioning-system tag takes just long enough to apply several strips of adhesive to the bird’s back. When I released my first patient, it blinked for a moment, shook itself off, then waddled placidly back to its nest, settling down to a state of quiet meditation with hardly a glance in my direction even though I still crouched just a few feet away. I wondered what it could possibly be thinking. Did it even connect me with what had just happened to it?

I wrangled several penguins in this way to apply the tags, and it was the same story each time: immediate calm upon release. They didn’t hold grudges. The birds were just as easy to grab a few days later when I returned to remove the tags. They maintained their good-natured curiosity toward me despite my interference.

It’s slightly harder to get hold of a penguin that isn’t on a nest. On one occasion, I found a bird meandering aimlessly with a metal flipper band (used to track individuals from one year to the next) that was bent out of shape. To fix the band, I’d have to catch the penguin. This required backup, so I radioed one of the other researchers, who brought a long-handled net.

The wandering penguin was as wily as could be. It would let me approach within ten feet with complete unconcern, but not one step closer. When I invaded that bubble of personal space, it backed away as quickly as I advanced. The bird was fast, too; when I sprinted at full speed across the ice, it easily ducked my
grasp, sidestepping like an expert matador as I slid past. Only by flanking the penguin between us could the other researcher and I get close enough to try to snag it with the net. Even so, it took several tries and a final, heroic dive to pin the bird down.

I could tell the penguin was panicking as we disentangled it from the net and, in just a few seconds, fixed up its band. Like others I’d handled, it bit my armpit and bashed my chest with its flippers—a surprisingly strong force from an eight-pound bird barely taller than a bowling pin. When I let it go, it danced off a few steps until it had regained its ten-foot buffer zone, sighed, and immediately lost all visible interest in me, as if I didn’t exist.

—

FEAR IS AN EMOTION
shaped by danger, so it’s no surprise that birds in remote regions are generally approachable; they’ve lost their fear of people—or, more likely, never learned it in the first place. This is especially true in polar areas and on isolated islands where humans have ventured only recently. The very remoteness of the existence of these birds protects them.

One of the best places to experience this effect is the Galápagos Islands, where visitors often comment that the local wildlife has no fear. Camera-toting tourists delight in walking right up to boobies, albatrosses, iguanas, and sea lions without causing the least fuss; it’s enchanting to be so intimately close with wild animals.

Even Charles Darwin was taken by the tame nature of Galápagos wildlife. When he visited the islands in 1835, the young naturalist tried an experiment on a marine iguana that was basking on a sunny beach. Darwin walked up to the three-foot-long iguana, picked it up by its tail, and, without warning, flung the reptile as far as he could into the ocean. (Darwin didn’t
show much compassion for Galápagos iguanas. He often killed and ate them, referred to them as “stupid,” and nicknamed them “imps of darkness.”) In response, the iguana swam to shore and crawled right back to the spot where it had been basking, still at the naturalist’s feet. Darwin leaned over, picked it up again, and again threw it into the ocean. The iguana crawled back to its spot, looking confused. This cycle was repeated many times, even though, as Darwin later pointed out, the lizard could easily have escaped by swimming lazily away along the shoreline.

The iguana-tossing experiment fascinated Darwin. Fourteen years before he penned
On the Origin of Species
and became history’s most famous naturalist, he published a book called
The Voyage of the Beagle
describing his five-year trip around the world. Of twenty-three adventurous chapters, only one was dedicated to the Galápagos, but Darwin found plenty of space to ponder the “apparent stupidity” of the tossed iguana.

“This reptile has no enemy whatsoever on shore, whereas at sea it must often fall a prey to the numerous sharks,” he mused. “Urged by a fixed and hereditary instinct that the shore is its place of safety, whatever the emergency may be, it there takes refuge.” In other words, iguanas aren’t completely fearless; they are just more afraid of sharks than anything on land.

Galápagos birds are likewise nonchalant about people, but, like Antarctic penguins, only up to a point. The Galápagos National Park regulations do not allow tourists to approach wildlife beyond a threshold of disturbance—if the animal reacts to you, you’re too close. In the case of nesting seabirds, this might be as near as three feet. Try to nudge closer than that, and you’ll get a daggerlike beak aimed at your face. The rules are there to protect people as well as birds.

This disturbance threshold is called flight distance—the
distance at which an animal begins to react in the face of approaching danger—and has been measured to study fear in all kinds of animals. Of course, fear of humans doesn’t always translate to other fears, and flight distance varies with context. But because it’s easy to quantify, flight distance is often used to indicate perceived levels of risk.

Flight distance generally decreases with the disappearance of humans and other large predators, which makes sense: There is little benefit to being fearful for animals in predator-free environments. Experience defines the best way to react. In the cases of Antarctic penguins and Galápagos iguanas, this dictates indifference; running away just wastes energy if there is no danger of being eaten. But in the rest of the world, most wildlife—besides a few animals with special defense mechanisms, such as rattlesnakes and tigers—is much more skittish.