“In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear,” Henry Beston observed of other animals two generations before naturalist Sy Montgomery reflected on her encounters with thirteen different animals to insist that “our world, and the worlds around and within it, is aflame with shades of brilliance we cannot fathom.”
An epoch before Beston and Montgomery — before we had the science to fathom how owls see with sound, how dolphins and whales communicate in supersonic hieroglyphics, how hummingbirds defy the physics of gravity, and what birds dream about — John James Audubon (April 26, 1785–January 27, 1851) observed with astonishment and awe the myriad ways in which birds respond to the world with qualities of mind his contemporaries considered singularly human: tenderness and anger, memory and foresight, prudence and percipience about tides and tornadoes and the forces of nature far beyond mere instinct, far beyond human understanding.
While working on the brown pelican divination for my Almanac of Birds, I was struck by a strikingly sensitive and scientifically prescient passage in Audubon’s essay on the species, suspended like all of his writing partway between ornithological description and lyrical memoir of personal encounters. Lamenting the population decline of the brown pelican in his lifetime, he marvels at the mysterious intelligence of these strange and ancient seabirds:
The Brown Pelicans are as well aware of the time of each return of the tide, as the most watchful pilots. Though but a short time before they have been sound asleep, yet without bell or other warning, they suddenly open their eyelids, and all leave their roosts, the instant when the waters, which have themselves reposed for awhile, resume their motion. The Pelicans possess a knowledge beyond this, and in a degree much surpassing that of man with reference to the same subject: they can judge with certainty of the changes of weather. Should you see them fishing all together, in retired bays, be assured, that a storm will burst forth that day; but if they pursue their finny prey far out at sea, the weather will be fine, and you also may launch your bark and go to the fishing.
In consonance with Beston’s insistence that “we need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals,” Audubon adds:
I ponder on the faculties which Nature has bestowed on animals which we merely consider as possessed of instinct. How little do we yet know of the operations of the Divine Power!
Audubon often contemplated the intelligence of birds in his journal, nowhere more so than in an 1833 entry about the species to which he would soon devote the greatest number of pages — twenty — in his voluminous Birds of America (and which yielded one of the most direct and sobering bird divinations). Writing on the summer solstice, he jabs at our human hubris:
The Wild Goose is an excellent diver, and when with its young uses many beautiful stratagems to save its brood, and elude the hunter. They will dive and lead their young under the surface of the water, and always in a contrary direction to the one expected; thus if you row a boat after one it will dive under it, and now and then remain under it several minutes, when the hunter with outstretched neck, is looking, all in vain, in the distance for the stupid Goose! Every time I read or hear of a stupid animal in a wild state, I cannot help wishing that the stupid animal who speaks thus, was half as wise as the brute he despises, so that he might be able to thank his Maker for what knowledge he may possess.
Complement with poet turned environmental historian and philosopher of science Melanie Challenger on how to be more animal and artist James Bridle on rethinking intelligence, then revisit the story of the seamstress who laid the foundation for the study of octopus intelligence the year Audubon contemplated the brilliance of the goose in his journal.