When I posted Peter Barss's photos of tool-using nuthatches, it struck me as remarkable that two different species were using the same tool in the same location on the same day. I wondered if there could be some teaching and learning at work here, but figured I was getting getting over my head, animal behaviour-wise. Contrarian reader Bill Matheson had the same thought: You may also have evidence here, even if anecdotal, to suggest cross-species cultural transmission of tool use. The red-breasted nuthatch seems to be gifted at learning from other species, according to the Nuthatch article on Wikipedia: "The Red-breasted Nuthatch,...

05 October, 2010

Whenever business kept him overnight in Halifax, Irving Schwartz liked to stay at the Lord Nelson Hotel, as does his son-in-law and protégé, Adrian Noskwith. Late Monday night, Adrian checked into the Lord Nelson for the first time since Irving's death. On the desk in his suite he found a sympathy card signed by the hotel manager and 30 hotel staff. [W.R. MacAskill photo.]...

05 October, 2010

For a long time, we humans flattered ourselves with the belief that tool use was among our defining and exclusive traits. In the last decades of the 20th Century, we grudgingly conceded the  franchise — first to primates, then elephants, cetaceans, and birds. But who knew we had tool-using songbirds right here in Nova Scotia? Sunday afternoon, two nuthatches, one red-breasted, one white-breasted, transformed a stump in West Dublin, Nova Scotia, into a vice. The birds wedged sunflower seeds into a crack in the stump, thus freeing their beaks to peck open the firmly secured meals. Few things annoy the Contrarian more...

04 October, 2010

On the evening of September 12, a hit-and-run driver struck Neil Alan Smith on Fourth Street North, St. Petersburg, FL, throwing him off his mountain bike. Smith, 48, a dishwasher at the Crab Shack restaurant in St. Petersburg, died six days later at Bayfront Medical Center. When the Times announced Smith's death on its website, a reader commented: A man who is working as a dishwasher at the Crab Shack at the age of 48 is surely better off dead. Times editors swiftly removed the post, deeming it offensive and insensitive to the dead man’s friends and family. Then they took another, more...

02 October, 2010