The Lorikeet High-Five

When lorikeets compete over access to food, the decisive fighting is between males, though females play a supporting rôle and fight each other.  In alpha couples, the female may behave as aggressively as the male.

When a male wins a decisive victory, he and his partner will sometimes engage in a joint victory celebration, realised by a very rapid serpentine co-ordinated movement of beaks, in conjunction with very agitated, loud, brief "cooing".  This can be seen as rewarding the joint behaviour of the "team".

I have also observed the very same semiosis in pigeons, though with reduced vocalisation.

Inherited Reflexes

Lorikeet chicks have reflexes that become altered by experience.  For example, on seeing any sudden nearby movement while feeding, a chick will automatically take to flight in the opposite direction, while adults will continue feeding regardless.

This raises the question of whether lorikeets inherit reflexes to their own alarm calls — i.e. to their own semiotic system — or whether the flight response is learned through experience, as by imitating others.  It sometimes seems as though such a flight response is not under their immediate control, since some birds will sometimes shut down the flight response moments after the initial reaction, as if regaining control.

Specifying The Food Desired

Rainbow lorikeets feed on both seeds, which they crack with their beaks, and on nectar which they collect on their brush-like tongues (hence trichoglossus), though they prefer nectar.

To indicate the desire to be fed nectar rather than seeds, some birds will maintain eye-contact with the human feeder, open their beaks, and extend their tongues to their full length.

That is to say, this expression of the instrumental microfunction ('I want it') differentiates the desired object by the bodily action used to process it.

An Expression Of The Regulatory Microfunction

When a lorikeet is driven off food by a more dominant bird, it will sometimes perch above the feeding lorikeet and defæcate.

Similarly, when barking as a group in a tree at a perceived threat near their food source below, some will sometimes position themselves above the offending human so as to deliver fæces in his direction.

Low Rising Pitch

When a senior lorikeet is feeding and a junior lorikeet is watching, looking as if it might challenge for the food, the higher ranked bird will issue a medium-volume fricated sound with low-rising pitch as a warning to the youngster.

(It is very close to the gruff "Wait for it!" command of the Roman centurion in a scene of the film The Life Of Brian where the 'crucifixion party' is about to set off on their march to Calvary.)

Angry-sounding fricated sounds are generally used for vocally "pushing" other birds away, with sound volume proportional to the level of threat/anger/fear.

In English, the low-rising tone is often used with a mild command or negative command, which, as Halliday (2004: 141) says 'has the effect of leaving the decision to the listener'.

The lorikeet call can be compared to the human language situation where an older sibling says to the younger: "Just try it!", entailing "and see what happens!"

Do Lorikeets Have Facial Expressions?

Relating Events Without Language

Language enables humans to construe two events as causally related.  Lorikeets are able to remember sequences of events, which is tantamount to establishing temporal if-then relations — temporal conditionals — but it is not clear whether they are capable of construing one event as caused by another.

For example, their behaviour shows that they know that food appears in dishes soon after they see me arriving on the back patio, and once a daily routine is established, on seeing me, they anticipate the arrival of food by flying to the dishes before they are filled.

But when this temporal continuity is broken, they do not necessarily link me to the provision of food.  For example, if I stand near their feeding dishes outside of this ritual, as many as 40 birds in the tree above will co-ordinate a very loud threatening call in an attempt to drive me away, thus treating me either as a ground predator or as a rival for their food source, rather than as the cause of its provision.

Anthropomorphism?

Anthropomorphism is the practice of ascribing human properties to non-humans. Whether or not such an ascription is anthropomorphic, therefore, crucially depends on whether or not the property being ascribed is exclusively human. However, the evolution of species means that all organisms and the properties ascribed to them are evolved variants of one another, having differentiated from a common source. On this basis, behavioural properties ascribable to humans are differentiated variants of properties ascribable to other animal species, and so are hyponyms (“daughters”) of superordinate (“parent”) categories that transcend synchronic species boundaries. The more differentiated the species being compared, the more generalised the superordinate category, and the greater the distance between it and its hyponyms.

To claim that certain traits are exclusively human is to ignore all the graduated evolutionary steps that link species down the generations, and to maintain the anthropocentric perspective of Abrahamic mythology. Complaints of anthropomorphism, sometimes couched in terms of respecting the “dignity” of other species, actually betray the fear of (the “indignity” of) being like other species, and so, betray such fears as not being a separate, unique, special creation, or as being determined robotic mechanisms, and so on; in short, the fear that human life might be as unimportant as some consider the lives of other species to be. The more undervalued the other species, the more intense may be the fear (and the denial of it).

from The Life Of Meaning

Lorikeet Schadenfreude?

When young lorikeets "rise above their station" in some way — e.g. eating prior to "their betters" — they typically "get their comeuppance" from more senior lorikeets, who bark angrily at them and often back up the bark with a threat of physical attack — a fairly obvious instance of the regulatory microfunction.

A nearby lorikeet, observing such an encounter, will sometimes vocalise a "hah-hah" call that is almost identical with that used by the character Nelson from the US cartoon show The Simpsons to express schadenfreude.

I have never heard this call used in any other situation.

So this, too, might be interpreted as regulatory in function, perhaps enacted at peer level, since it reinforces the more direct regulatory behaviour of the higher ranked bird.

Visual Perception Without Language

Without language to label visual experience, the visual field is just a configuration of patterns, more or less like a Jackson Pollock painting.  This puts enormous pressure on memory, and makes the detection of difference, such as sudden movements (changes in the pattern), a matter of life and death.

It is not clear how far the semiosis of adult lorikeets — they can live as long as 35 years — develops beyond protolanguage to the point of labelling phenomena.  From observations of their behaviour, I suspect they have intersubjective labels — labels for each other — though it may be just that they recognise each other by indexical features, such as the timbre of their calls.

Background Information

I have been observing the semiosis of (wild) rainbow lorikeets since 2001, chiefly in social situations of feeding and bathing.  Every social activity is an opportunity for renegotiating the pecking order.  Their society has much in common with some baboon societies: hierarchical disputes can be vicious and end in the death of the loser.  The chief murderous technique is to pin the opponent on the ground on their back.  Survivors of such fights usually have feathers missing from the area around their hearts.