Yesterday I ran just over 4km and when I calculated my pace it said 9.07 minutes per km! Perhaps I miscalculated, because that seems very slow.
But again today, I ran 5.19 km and the calculation was 8.05 mins per km. So, a little better but still over the magical 8 minute mark! Slipping up somewhat.
Maybe it was because of the clouds of colour hanging from each tree, which delighted me each time I started again round the meadow-track. Some are big fat cumulo-nimbus clouds, others more delicate cirrus, almost faded to nothing. And then, along the road through the woods, each deciduous tree wears lanterns of light which illuminate the dark forest.
While I was gathering dandelion leaves for the little piggie, squatting down I spied a long brown snake in the golden leaves. By the time I came back with my camera the pretty sight had slithered away.
And then from a distance I could hear geese honking, which grew louder until I could see the first of the flock, flying at some speed in formation, chatting to one another, while behind them came the delinquents, all just hurtling along in no particular order, who were obviously arguing very vocally about which direction they should follow, who should be in the front, who should ride shotgun, etc etc.
Later I listened to a fascinating podcast about communication among animals. It seems that prairiedogs have the most amazing vocabulary. They can distinguish between a short fat person wearing a red shirt and a tall skinny person wearing a blue shirt and will chat about this even when the person isn't there, which is definitively abstract thought.
The research was carried out by recording the noises made by the prairie-dogs, say for example their range of warning calls, taking these back to the lab and slowing everything down to enhance it, which releases the different tones within what to our naked ears sounds like the identical warning sound. One of the researchers mentioned how the prairie dogs will be happily foraging or eating, and one will raise its head and chitter-chatter, chitter-chatter, and then another one will raise its head and chatter-chitter, chatter-chitter, and they have not worked out yet what they are saying to one another. He said it may just be "chitter-chatter, chitter-chatter", but it could also be, "Hey, do you know where Sam was last night?"
All these experiments are brilliant, because they show the world that animals are not just creatures to be plundered like the rest of the earth, but that contrary to the musings of Rene Descartes, "The word is the sole sign and certain mark of the presence of thought.", and even the great Noam Chomsky, who believes that the basic lack of grammar and syntax in animal communication "precludes non-human species from higher cognition", more and more research is proving that many species actually use complex "language" like humans. Which should lead to better treatment for animals, shouldn't it?
Another group of researchers headed by Klaus Zuberbuhler, a Swiss scientest, did similar research on primate communication in the very dense (and noisy) Tai forest in Cote d'Ivoire, where there are 10 different types of primates, among them Diana monkeys, very beautiful monkeys, and Campbell's monkeys. Diana monkeys live 100 feet off the ground, eating fruit and insects and they chatter a lot. The researcher would walk out with a boombox, play the sound of a leopard, their most feared predator, and they would all leap about making an alarm call, and they would all scamper further up the tree. If he played then the shrieks of the crowned eagle, another predator, they would make a slightly different sound, and rush down the tree. The difference in sounds can be seen in the acoustic details on a computer. So their sounds are filled with little ghost notes that we can't hear.
So then Klaus, the researcher, wanted to know if different types of monkeys could understand one another, rather like an English speaker being able to understand French people talking on a train if you know the French language. So he played the Campbell's monkeys' alarm calls to the Diana monkeys, who took them very seriously, running up the trees if it was the leopard alarm, and down if it was the Campbells' eagle alarm!
And it didn't stop there, hornbills could also discriminate between the different alarm calls, so it seems as though "a pretty substantial web of species are basically eavesdropping on each others' calls in this forest" Klaus Zuberbuhler.
One day he was far away from camp, when he realised that it was getting late and he still had a long way to get home. So he was walking past a kind of valley, when he heard on the other side of the valley, a monkey group making the leopard alarm call. He was not actively listening for it, and was excited to be able to understand them. So he carried on walking and the next group across the valley did the same thing, the leopard alarm call. When the third group did the same thing, Klaus realised, with a chill down his spine, that a leopard was tracking him! Then the fourth group and the fifth did the same thing, and then they all stopped. So he picked up a big stick, which wouldn't have done much against a leopard, apparently, and then suddenly experienced an epiphany, that he just entered the forest, he had become the 11th primate in the forest. "Suddenly I shifted from being the objective observer, to being part of that whole crowd in there, even though we are separated by 20-30 millions of years of evolutionary history, these humble creatures were able to teach me something about what was going on in the forest, of course it wasn't intentional, they weren't trying to inform me or anything, but it was still a very emotional experience."
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