A story about difficult communication and the wish for understanding.
Content warning
None
The short story
George was furious again. He waddled back and forth between two trees, complaining in a high pitched tone how they could be so stupid. “They don’t listen! They don’t hear what I am saying at all!”, he complained, getting more and more agitated. Julia was already used to this. His outbursts happened regularly, particularly on Fridays when he had been trying for a week without success. And every Friday, she told him the same: “Just give it a bit more time, George. These things don’t happen overnight. They will understand us at some point.” But if she was being honest, she also lost more and more hope, the more days passed without meaningful progress. All their efforts really seemed to be futile. But at least George did not seem to run out of motivation to keep trying.
They recurringly discussed it in their weekly group meeting, every Sunday at dawn. That’s when they met to discuss important matters that had come up during the last week, like too much littering in the area where they lived, loud construction work, or annoying cars. So basically a meeting to complain about all the things their neighbors did. Although their last meetings had been centering around only one topic: The state of the environment. The end of the world. They always met on the northeast corner of the lake, within a wide-spread nature reserve that was their home. Well, not everyone, really it was all the birds living in or crossing their lake area. This was where they could catch the last sunrays and this is also where the most food could be found. Sunday morning was an especially good time to be out, as everybody else was too. People working out, small children running all over the place, and their grandparents trying to keep up, carrying bags of old bread with them. Bread brunch, they called it, as they continuously ate from morning until afternoon, when the children had been aired out enough and were slowly dragged home for dinner and bedtime stories.
Today’s meeting had been intense and Julia felt very tired. The ravens, as always, led the meeting. Unlike all of the others, the geese, the ducks, the swans, etc., they did not stay at the lake but regularly met with other bird congregations during the week. Assessing the problems and discussing larger matters concerning all birds. This environment matter was serious and all of them knew it. They had been seeing signs all over their little neighborhood. Small signs, barely visible, but they paid attention. They saw things the others couldn’t. They regularly found dead birds wrapped in or choked on plastic packaging. The lake had been changing for a while, in many different ways. The temperatures were more intense than they had been last year, with hot and cold periods rapidly alternating. This affected the plants, the fish, the insects, and the birds as well. They found less and less food over the year. Many of their children did not make it through the winter. The ravens had reported that it was the same in other areas, even kilometers away. “Oblivious people!”, she heard George’s voice from a few days ago. “Stupid humans!”.
She did understand him, it was frustrating. But George was also a goose and they were easily annoyed, bordering on hysterical sometimes (although she would of course never tell him or the other geese this, bird-to-bird). Paul, Ringo, and John were similar to George, choleric and angry. Even though her own temper was much more calm and nothing phased her too easily, she was also getting increasingly worried. Their biggest problem was that the humans, the people who were responsible for all these changes, didn’t listen. Didn’t hear them. Didn’t understand. Julia looked around for her children. Her six ducklings were all swimming in the shallow shore by the edge of the lake, not far from her. They never strayed far, they were still too young for that. Most humans had gone home, just a lonely child of around three years was playing in the sandy area next to the lake, the parent sitting on a bench deeply invested in intense phone reading. Julia was happy they didn’t have phones, it seemed like an awful waste of time to her.
Should we try harder?, she asked herself. They had really tried everything. They went up to people regularly to tell them about these obvious changes in the environment, showing them the dying plants, bringing them the bird carcasses wrapped in plastic. But the humans didn’t understand. It’s like they spoke a different language. On the contrary, hearing loud quacking noises instead of words made humans more suspicious and afraid of them. Especially the children were easily frightened. So they had stopped, keeping their distance from humans, and were now discussing other strategies, without a concrete solution in sight.
She looked around. Her ducklings had already gone to bed with her partner, while she was out on her regular evening waddle across the sandy part of the shore. The sun had nearly set. It was time to go home. “It really is useless!”, she said half out loud, happy that nobody could hear her. Everybody had gone back to their nests and nobody saw her frustration. Only two swans glid along the shore looking for left-over bread pieces. “What’s useless?”, she heard somebody say. Julia jerked around, she didn’t expect anyone this close to her this late in the day. The two swans were too far away for her to have heard anything they were saying. They were robably gossiping about the rest of them. It must be George, falling into one of his rants again and needing some audience. But she didn’t see him. All of a sudden it was eerily quiet. She realized the birds in the trees above her had gone very quiet. Nobody said anything. No sound at all. Except a tiny, high-pitched voice: “Say it again!”
Suddenly the small child that had played in the sand was next to her, looking at her expectantly. “Uhm…”, she was speechless. It was impossible. How could they have overlooked this? “I am Lina, what is your name?”, the little human asked her expectantly. “Julia. My name is Julia.”, she answered, still stunned by what was happening at this moment. “Lina, get away from the duck, that’s dangerous! It’s time to go home!”. The mother was up in no time and running towards them. The loud parent voice scared both Julia and the girl, whose name was apparently Lina and who had for some reason Julia couldn’t yet grasp, understood what she said. She jumped and waddled backwards. “Don’t be scared, Julia, my mom sometimes speaks very loud when she is scared for me. I have to go home now, but you can tell me what you meant tomorrow? I’ll be back on the playground after kindergarten, if the weather is nice.”
Without waiting for an answer, Lina ran into the open arms of her mom, who scooped her up and carried her away, suspiciously looking back at Julia. Julia stood there for a minute or an eternity. She could not wait to tell the others tomorrow. She could not wait to tell the others. She could not wait to tell. “Geooooooorge, wake up! Ringoooo! Jooohn! EVERYBODY!!!”, she screamed, using all the power her little lung could muster up, and making a few tiny tree birds fly up panickingly. “Just wait until you hear this!”
This story was originally written in English.
The paper
Adriaense, J. E., Martin, J. S., Schiestl, M., Lamm, C., & Bugnyar, T. (2019). Negative emotional contagion and cognitive bias in common ravens (Corvus corax). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(23), 11547-11552. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1817066116
Connection between story and paper
The story is about birds living at a lake, realizing the extent and danger of climate change, and trying to warn the humans around them. The paper is about information transmission between ravens, who are very intelligent animals. The authors brought so-called demonstrator ravens in two different emotional states - positive and negative. These ravens were then observed by other ravens. The experiment wanted to find out whether observing ravens in a certain emotional state leads to a “contagion” of that emotions in the other, observing ravens. The authors found evidence for negative emotional contagion, meaning that the negative state of the demonstrator ravens transferred to the observer ravens. Interestingly, this was not the case for positive emotions, where no transfer happened. The study presents first evidence that emotional contagion is present not only in mammalian but also in avian species. The authors also argue that their study is a first step to understanding the evolution of empathy, as emotion contagion is a precursor needed for empathizing with the emotions of others.
What are you actively doing to protect the environment around you?
The author
Helena has developed Science and Fiction and writes many of the stories herself. Her current research as an active scientist focuses on the behavioural and neural basis of pain, pain modulation and treatment expectations based on placebo and nocebo effects. She completed her PhD at the Social, Cognitive, and Affective Neuroscience Unit at the Institute for Psychology of Cognition, Emotion and Methods at the University of Vienna, where she investigated empathy and prosocial behaviour in the area of pain.
