The cover image was sourced from https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2014.09.020.
If you’ve ever fallen down the easily addictive, low-stress rabbit hole that is the world of wonderfully awesome animal videos, you might have come across this video of a crow in Russia, sliding down a snow-covered roof while perching on a jar lid.
While it’s easy to think that this crow went sledding purely for their own enjoyment, scientists aren’t content with that conclusion – thinking in such an anthropomorphic way projects our own human thoughts and feelings onto animals who, while exhibiting familiar behaviors, may not be doing it for the same reasons we do (Emery & Clayton, 2015).
But, regardless of what we may think, birds do play! What does that look like? Well, most forms of play are divided into one of several categories: the first broad category being locomotor play, which includes all kinds of flight-related play – hanging from surfaces, flying upside down (Emery & Clayton, 2015), and even sledding down a snowy roof in Russia!
Social play involves interactions between birds – there’s play chasing, where one bird follows another, whether on the ground or through the air. We also have play fighting, where two birds engage in actions adopted from antagonistic behaviors. There’s also play invitation, where two birds engage in actions that occur primarily before play. Finally, we have social object play, where two birds engage with one or more objects in their environment (Bond & Diamond, 2003).
While we briefly touched on it, object play itself can be considered another major category of play – involving exploration, curiosity, object manipulation, where birds learn about the structure of objects, if they’re edible or not, and how they might work (Emery & Clayton, 2015).
Figure 2 Source: https://corvidresearch.blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/northwestern-crow-youngsters-playing-tug-of-war_595.jpg
The problem with researching play is that birds don’t necessarily need a reason to play – even when considering the anthropomorphic projection we cast onto them from our human perspectives, it can be as simple as having fun!
“Fun”, at least, in the context of the brain, involves taking part in something rewarding that provides a sense of pleasure. You may have heard of the neurotransmitter dopamine… it plays an important role in the reward-seeking system, controlling the search for reward-inducing stimuli for almost all creatures (Emery & Clayton, 2015).
When people come across phenomena like this in the wild, the answer that tends to come to mind often lies on the justifying end of the spectrum; in our attempt to be objective, we may implicitly assign a “value” to that act of play. Perhaps birds play fight to practice hunting, perhaps birds engage in social play to form strong, interconnected networks, and perhaps that crow slid down that roof to learn how to use that lid!
Studies done on the potential concrete benefits of play – such as relative brain size, for instance – ultimately find that there is little to no predictive value between the complexity of play with those benefits. As such, it is hard to say whether or not the act of play is utilitarian in nature (Bond & Diamond, 2003).
Does that mean that play is inherently fun? Once again, it’s hard to say! Humans, after all, may be the only species that have the luxury of leisure time. The time we spend solely pursuing pleasure: games, hobbies, activities we may find fun, are all a product of modern developments. We no longer have to hunt or grow our own food, we no longer have to worry about predators, we no longer have to worry about forming civilized societies – but birds, and by extension, all other animals, do (Emery & Clayton, 2015)!
Perhaps that is the underlying reason why we believe play has to have a purpose. Wild animals have a limited time to find food, find water, avoid predators, find a mate, raise offspring, all in the name of the cycle of life. Why, then, would a bird waste its time playing for the sake of playing? Why, then, do we have examples of crows sledding through the snow?
All of these questions are interesting to ponder, and I personally don’t have all the answers. The realm of neuroscience is far out of my understanding, but I hope I’ve done a good job setting the stage for this interesting question.
I’ll leave things here with a plan of action to you, the reader – whenever you see a cute animal video in the future, think to yourself: why could this be happening? Is it play, or is it intentional? Most importantly, though… why is it so gosh darn adorable?!
Reference List
Bond, A., & Diamond, J. (2003). A Comparative Analysis of Social Play in Birds. Behaviour, 140(8-9), 1091–1115. https://doi.org/10.1163/156853903322589650
Emery, N., & Clayton, N. (2015). Do birds have the capacity for fun? Current Biology, 25(1), R16–R20. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2014.09.020
