Lesson 17 Animal Laughter

Lesson 17 Animal Laughter

Conrad Lorenz

When studying the behavior of higher animals, something interesting often happens, but the protagonist of the laugh is often not the animal, but the observer himself. They often disregard their dignity when dealing with highly intelligent birds or mammals, so it is really impossible to blame some laymen for criticizing that scientists who study animal behavior experiment with grotesque methods. If it weren't for my notoriously harmless nature, I would have been put in an insane asylum long ago, and by the time I tell a little story, you'll understand why the residents of Fort Atten think I'm crazy.

For a while I was doing experiments on water ducks to explain a question that had been in my mind for a long time. The question is this: the goose that has just hatched from the artificial incubator always recognizes the first creature it encounters as its mother and follows her wholeheartedly; But the water duck is different, all the little kin raised by the artificial incubator, always extremely shy, difficult to approach, every time out of the shell, they quickly escape, hiding in the nearby dark corner and refusing to come out. What is the reason for this?

I remember once I took a bunch of water duck eggs to a musk duck to incubate, and as soon as Xiao Rin's feathers dried up, he also fled immediately, and I struggled to capture them. Once again, I had a fat white duck hatch on the farm, and the little ones happily followed her as if she were their real mother. I guess the key must be in the call of the mother duck, because from the appearance, whether it is a domestic white duck or a musk duck, it looks very different from the real water duck; However, the call of the white duck is the same as that of the water duck - this is because the farm's domestic duck was originally domesticated by wild ducks, and during this domestication process, the color of the wild duck feathers and the shape of the body have changed greatly, but the name remains the same.

I came to a fairly clear conclusion: if I wanted Xiao Rin to follow me, I would have to learn from my mother. "He hung a bell around his neck and made a mooing sound in his mouth, and the calf thought he was a cow." Bush's verse best illustrates this situation.

So I immediately set about doing this experiment. On the seventh Sunday after Easter, I put a litter of duck eggs in an artificial incubator. As soon as the little duck came out of the shell and the feathers had just dried, I learned the call of the mother water duck and kept calling them. Sure enough, this time the ducklings weren't afraid of me at all, and they looked at me trustingly, huddled into a pile, and let me take them away with my bark. My conjecture was thus fully confirmed: the newly born chicks only have an instinctive reaction to the mother's cry, but do not know what the mother should look like; As long as it calls like a mother duck, whether it is a fat Peking duck or a fatter person, it becomes their mother.

However, this substitute should not be too high. At the beginning of the experiment, I was crawling in the grass like a duckling, but I gradually changed to a sitting position. But as soon as I got up and tried to take them away, they didn't move; Their little eyes anxiously explored the surroundings, but did not look upward, and before long, like abandoned ducklings, they let out thin screams and cried. Therefore, in order to get them to follow me, I had to squat and walk, which was naturally quite uncomfortable. What's especially bad is that the mother's water duck has to call all the time, as long as she forgets to sing "croak, croak" for half a minute, Xiao Rin's neck is elongated, just like a child's face is elongated. If I don't keep calling, they're going to cry screaming. As if as long as I don't make a sound, they think I'm dead, or think I don't love them anymore? That's a reason to cry!

Ducklings are different from geese, ducklings are demanding of their mother's needs, and it is a tiring task to bring them. When I think about it, I not only have to crawl on the ground, but I also have to rattle constantly, which is really not fun.

But in order to seek the truth, he had to endure this test. So, that Sunday, as I led the ducklings to squat, crawl, and bark on the green grass of our garden, and I was secretly proud of their obedience, I looked up sharply and saw a row of dead white faces on the railing of the garden.

This is naturally some tourists from other places, who are probably frightened by the sight in front of them, because they only see a big man with a big beard, bent knees, bent over, crawling on the grass with his head down, peeking back from time to time, while loudly learning the duck call - as for those ducklings, those ducklings that make people understand the reason at first glance, but they are completely hidden in the deep grass, how can you call those tourists believe their eyes?

Cave Wu's memory is excellent, as long as they are caught once, they will never forget them, and they will warn each other and attack them in groups. I have a lot of burrows, and every time I have to tie a tin ring to a bird for identification, it hurts a lot of nerves. Every time I took the birds out of the nest, I inevitably bumped into the adult cave crows, and after a while, my side was full of noisy and angry birds, which naturally hindered my future interactions with them.

How can I make them not treat me as an enemy and avoid me when they see me? The answer is simple: makeup. But what is disguise? I suddenly remembered the ghost costumes worn every December 6th to celebrate St. Nicholas and the Devil's Day, which were now lying in a box in the attic, and it was very convenient to take them out. It was a gorgeous, all-black furry ghost suit, and not only that, but also a mask that covered the entire head, horns, a tongue that dragged around the mouth, and a very long tail.

If, on a lovely June day, you suddenly hear a terrible noise from the roof of a tall house. You look up, but it is a horned, tailed, toothed and clawed Satan, climbing from chimney to chimney, so hot that even his tongue falls out, and there are a bunch of blackbirds around him, screaming and chasing, I really don't know what you think?

Probably wouldn't guess that this devil was using pliers to put a tin ring on the bird, right? It wasn't until I finished my work that day that I found that the streets of the village were already crowded with people, their expressions of amazement the same as the expressions of the pile of tourists on the railing. If I take off my clothes at this time and explain it to them again, I believe they will understand the reason; But in doing so, the birds will recognize me and lose the original meaning of my disguise. So I just wagged my tail amicably and quickly disappeared through the skylight in the attic.

The third time I was almost sent to an insane asylum, I was to blame for my yellow-crowned parrot "Coco". A few days before Easter that year, I paid a considerable sum of money for this beautiful and tame bird. It took several weeks for the poor fellow to recover from the mental abuse he had suffered from his long confinement. At first it doesn't even know that it is no longer bound by anklets and can move at will; Seeing this proud big bird sitting on a branch and wanting to fly but not daring to fly is really pitiful. But in the end, when he overcame this psychological barrier, he immediately became lively and energetic, and he fell in love with me.

At night we usually lock it up in the house to sleep, and as soon as it comes out in the morning, it always can't wait to find me. It wasn't long before he knew where to find me: first he must fly to the window of my bedroom, and if I wasn't in it, he would go to the pond where the ducks were kept. Wherever it is where I do my routine check in the morning, it will find it one by one. This pursuit is not without danger for him, because if he can't find me, he will fly farther and farther, and on several occasions he will get lost and will not be able to return home. Therefore, my assistants know that whenever I am not at home, I don't release cocoa at all.

One weekend in June, I took the train back to Aitenburg from Vienna. Because when the weather is nice, there are often tourists from other places who come to Aitenburg to swim on weekends, so there are many people who leave the station with me. I had only taken a few steps when I suddenly saw a large bird in front of me, slowly flying in the air quite far from the ground, its movements very slow, sometimes flapping its wings and sometimes gliding. For a moment, I was completely unsure what kind of bird it was, and to say that it was a vulture would be too heavy; It is said that it is a stork, but it is not big enough, and when the stork flies to such a height, its neck and legs should still be visible. At this time, it suddenly tilted a little. The afterglow of the setting sun shone on the bottom of its huge wings, like the night sky shining because of the stars, and I could see that it was a white bird - God! Isn't this cocoa? Its wings are moving steadily, not very clearly indicating that it is going on a long flight?

What should I do? Should I shout it? By the way, have you heard the song of the yellow-crowned parrot? If not, just think about the howl of the pig when killing the pig in the old way, and then amplify it several times with a megaphone. If a person exerts all his strength, holds his voice sharply, and makes an "oh-ah" sound, although it is not as imposing as a big parrot, it sounds quite similar. I used to try to call it like this, and every time it obediently came back to me, but now it flies so high that I don't know if it refuses to obey, because birds usually don't like to fly straight down from above. Is it called it or not? It really embarrassed me at that moment, if I called, it flew away without reason, how can I explain it to the person next to me?

But I still called. The people around me were all settled there as if they had taken root. Coco spread her wings and hesitated for a moment, then swooped down and stopped at my outstretched arm. Thankfully, I was finally relieved.

Another time, the bird's prank startled me. My father was old at the time, and his favorite thing was to take a nap on the balcony southwest of our house. Although I strongly disapproved of him sleeping in the strong sun, he refused to let anyone change his old habits. One day while he was taking a nap, I suddenly heard him cursing loudly like a soldier on the balcony. I hurried to see this old gentleman bent over, staggering over, his hands tightly around his waist.

"Oh my God, are you sick?"

"No," he said angrily, "I'm not sick at all, it's just that the bastard thing bit off all the buttons on my pants while I slept." ”

I ran to the crime scene to see, and sure enough, Coco not only bit off all the buttons on the old professor's body, but also lined up neatly on the ground: a bunch of buttons on the sleeves, a bunch of buttons on the vest, and, nicely, the buttons on the pants were also lined up.

This parrot has a good trick to compare with the rich imagination of monkeys and children, perhaps because of its love for my mother. In the summer, my mother would just sit in the yard and knit sweaters all the time. Coco seemed to know exactly what that soft ball of wool was for, and it always bit the exposed live thread end, and quickly flew into the air, opening up the whole ball of thread, like a paper kite dragging an extremely long tail. It always jumped high and then circled regularly around the lemon tree in front of our house. If no one is there to interrupt its trick, it will wrap the whole tree in bright wool, so that you can't untie it again. Our guests would often stand in front of this tree for half a day, unable to figure out why we dressed it up like this or how we wrapped the yarn around.