Reddit reviews What the Robin Knows: How Birds Reveal the Secrets of the Natural World

It's because humans don't follow the rules.


Every animal has a personal space bubble and they do "alarm" signs to show when another is getting in their bubble.


Example: A Robin is hunting worms. A deer is walking in the area. The Robin will stop feeding and look up at the deer. If the deer notices, it will shift course and go around the robin. If the deer doesn't notice and keeps heading towards the robin, the robin will stand up a little taller and maybe pump it's tail or fluff it's wings, using motion to show the deer, and any other animals, that he is not being respected. (Check out starting at 2:22) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8GBA7DmeM0&t=21s


If the deer keeps coming, the robin may jump a couple feet to the side or into a bush above the deer's head - a larger motion to show alarm. Other animals will notice this and look in that direction (the same behavior the robin first used to get the deer's attention.) If the deer would have started running at the robin, or jumped at it, the Robin would fly further up into the tree and given off a little "chirp!" alarm while pumping it's tail and maybe wiping it's beak on the branch, using movement and sound to show alarm. Making noise is dangerous for animals, so it's only done when absolutely necessary to alert all the other animals around it. (around 3:26 in the video, you can hear the robin chirp when it flies off)


Birds close to the robin will fly up and observe, and the birds a little further away will stand up and look. This creates pockets or bubbles of alarms around the landscape - the stronger the alarm, the bigger the bubble.


Humans now, we don't see the robin stand up and look at us. We don't see it stand taller, or take a few steps to the side. We don't see it fly up just above head level. When we notice a bird, we get an alarm because we startled it pretty bad, causing the bird to fly up and tell everyone about it by alarming. We don't follow the common courtesies of the natural world and so animals can't accurately predict our behaviors. This scares them, so the scream in panic.


If you slow down, walk slowly and quietly, and walk around the birds when they show the first stage of alarm - the standing up and looking - you can move through the landscape without setting off alarms.


If you want to learn more about this or have questions, let me know - I teach it occasionally, as well as other survival skills, and enjoy spreading it around.


Tl;dr: We are rude, don't follow the rules, and this scares animals.


EDIT: a good starter place for this type of awareness stuff: https://www.amazon.com/What-Robin-Knows-Secrets-Natural/dp/054400230X
and a shameless plug for https://wildernessawareness.org/

Keep filling your head with that information. Once you get a good grasp on foraging plants & fungi, you might be interested in picking up these books too:

What the Robin Knows

Reading Nature's Signs

How to Read Water

After you've gone through those, you go out into the woods.....

You know the scene in Superman, where he's a kid at school and locks himself in the closet because he's totally overwhelmed with sensory information? That's what going into the woods is like. Everywhere you look, more information coming in than you can possibly process.

Definitely. Sorry, this will be a bit long, but read through.

I think the first thing, is just getting out a little bit more often, of course, there's a sort of qualitative change that happens in you when you get out in nature.

But then there are nature observation skills you can develop. And this really can change the game a bit, and make it much more engaging to get out when you do.

The first thing I would suggest, and this you can do from your backyard, is learning to observe birds. The societies of the birds are omnipresent, more complex than you might think, and quite interesting and engaging once you break into the ability to watch them. It's best if you have something you can zoom in on them with. A pair of binoculars. I use a cheap camera that has a superzoom (Panasonic fz70). Of course, you don't need anything extra to observe the nature around you, that's just a suggestion.

There are different skills to develop here. One is learning to tune in with your audiovisual system. What I've been taught to do is to get very still, widen your vision, tune in with your ears, and soon you will detect a flicker here, a sound there, and the birds which you normally would have trouble finding can't help but reveal themselves to you.

If your location is anything like mine, there are some interesting things about the birds in your average backyard. First there are the ways they interact with eachother. What I've found most interesting though is that maybe 3 or 4 times each day, a Hawk will swoop through and try to catch one. Birds exist in cooperative multispecies complexes, and they all help eachother against these threats. You will be sitting there, and then suddenly, every bird will dart off into a hiding place, and then maybe 1 second later, a Hawk will come soaring through. Sometimes the Hawk will succeed. Just the other day I went outside to find a Hawk on a branch with one of the sparrows from my yard in its claw.

Another thing about birds is their language. If you observe for just like 2 or 3 months, by that time you will soon be able to distinguish each common species by the noises they make. And then you can go deeper and begin to understand what calls are just baseline behavior singing (most prevalent in the morning and afternoon choruses), what noises are made when two birds are fighting, what noises signify the aporoach of an aerial predator, what noises signify the approach of a ground predator, etc.

This isn't all about birds, but you'll notice as you explore more that birds are the most omnipresent type of animals in the wild. In the same way that they cooperate as a multispecies complex that warns eachother of a predators approach, if you enter a wooded area, the birds will begin making alarm noises to each other, sometimes even behaving as if they are "yelling at you". Not only do all the birds in an environment get alerted by this, so too do the mammals sense the change in baseline behavior and begin to hide.

When most people explore nature, they tramp through noisily, alerting every animal in there, and thus do not find much. They behave out of place, disrupt the baseline of an environment. Furthermore, their audiovisual systems are not attuned, not used to picking out where an animal might be, they may not even notice a huge raptor in the tree nearby, or the raccoon or fox as he slinks out of sight at the approaching commotion.

And finally, people do not understand how to observe animal track and sign. Everything that passes through an ecosystem will make marks upon it. We can begin by observing the overt signs. Everywhere the coyote goes, he leaves big canid footprints. As does the fox. Skunk and raccoon tracks are easily distinguiahable. Feline tracks may be a bobcat, maybe even a mountain lion, although they tend to be more light footed. And they all make different looking scat along the way. If there are beavers, you will see their signs everywhere. They gnaw at the bottom of trees, first removing the bark, then chewing into the tree, finally toppling them. As well as making dams and scent mounds, and big dens out of sticks. All the lumber beavers chew down has a particular pointed tip on it, and once you know it you see their sign everywhere.

If you learn how to follow the tracks of an animal, you enter into a perceptual relationship with it. It can bring you through an ecosystem in a way you would never have done, show you a bit of the ways the locals do things, bring you into new interesting areas, as well as give a glimpse into the mind and habits of that particular animal. But also, even if you just know the very basics of which tracks belong to which animal, you can come across a watering hole where the banks stay wet and muddy, and instantly know every animal which has visited the place.

Of course, you have to know how to move through an ecosystem so as to not disturb everything in it. The best way is to move quietly as possible, move strategically, and otherwise, move and behave as if you belong there. You should learn the Fox Walk, which you can read about in the Tom Brown book I'll link at the end. It takes a bit to practice, but once you get used to it you begin to naturally use it everytime you move in nature.

A general rule of thumb is this: in every little bit of nature there are many more animals than you know about, and they only come out when things are quiet and they feel like no one is around. It is very difficult to see even large animals in a thicket, and you have no idea how many countless smaller ones are wandering around in there. Every book I've ever read on the subject has recommended trying out the technique of finding a sit spot and hanging out there for awhile. It shows you nature in a way that is not possible when you are continually moving, it allows the possibility for things to resume normal behavior and pop out for you to see.

Another thing too is to observe little microcosms. Get your face really really close to a little patch of ground. You'll be astounded to realize that it is its whole own complex little world with all sorts of crazy fauna that you would never have seen otherwise. Then when you pull out, you'll be shocked to look around and realize just how vast everything really is, from that perspective. Oh how much we pass right over with each step!

I'm saving this right here because I am going to link some books and I have to see which ones to link, so if your reading this part give me one moment...

Some reccommended reading:

Tom Brown's Nature Observation Field Guide. This book is kind of hyped up and exaggerated, with a lot of native american lore, but what he teaches you is legitimate. The way to walk in nature, the way to look and listen, a lot of what I've told you comes from Tom Brown, and the more you read people from this genre, you'll see his ideas again and again. But if you where to only get one book on this subject I'd recommend this one. Despite me calling it hyped up, this book can really change your life if you practice what he says. (Although there are much better books on tracking itself though, look for actual guidebooks to learn more about that, but this book gives a good intro).

Art of Bird Finding. This one is about the perceptual skills needed to pick out birds. I found it very helpful.

What the Robin Knows. How I told you you can begin to analyze bird language and know what sounds mean what, and how their communications alert things in an ecosystem to disturbances in the baseline... This book is about that and how to learn to decode their language.

The Healing Art of Tracking. This book isn't that great, but it gave me some really useful concepts, such as the idea that you create concentric rings of disturbances around yourself as you move in an environment, and to always check the "dead zones" or hiding places in the brush around you as you move.

The forest unseen. This is a pretty entertaining and educational book by a biologist who goes back to one sit spot again and again over a year and describes what he observes there. Shows how much you can find if you look.

final word: sorry man, I have overloaded you with info here. No need to over think things. Ultimately, if you just begin to move through nature more slowly, carefully, and observantly, you will find so much. Don't try too hard, and most importantly have fun with it. Nature is great and we are a part of it too, we just have to learn how to inhabit it best. I hope you find a renewed connection with it, and have many great times. If you ever have anything you want to ask about it or what I've told you here, feel free to ask me!