I was thinking about this the other day watching my magpies. I have a couple of magpies that come to my backyard most nights. When I’m home I treat them to handfuls of shredded cheese, which they seem to enjoy. While snacking on the cheese they will often stop suddenly and come alert, then run a few feet from where they are standing to dig in the soil with their beaks. A few inches down they find these small grubs, which must be like chocolate to them the way they gobble them up. I figure it’s some protein to go with their cheese. I started wondering how on earth they know where to dig, and I discovered that ground-foraging animals like magpies have, over thousands of years, developed this keen sense, almost a type of sonar, to detect things moving just underneath the ground. It means they don’t have to waste their precious foraging time (they are diurnal, they have only daylight hours, say 12-15 hours or so each day, to search for food, water, feed their chicks, mate, etc) digging hundreds of empty holes hoping that perhaps five out of every hundred contains a grub – they zero-in on the grubs and know exactly where they are. This means they can scoop up their cheese and find all the grubs in my backyard before moving on to the next backyard rather than wasting hours in mine alone, and have a far better chance of being well-fed enough on any given day to go back to their gum tree, mate, procreate, and ensure the survival of their species. Pretty smart, if you ask me.
We humans don’t share this weird sixth-sense for detecting things under the ground because we never needed it – sure, we grow some food under the ground but it sprouts leaves above-ground so we know where to dig. But far more importantly, all of our prey lived above-ground. That’s why sight is our most powerful sense – it’s the one we used the most to survive and thus further our species. And we hardly ever hunted at night, we slept. So our night vision is pretty crap. Yet take a creature that does hunt at night – a cat, for instance. Studies have shown that cats can see pretty much as well at night as they can during the day. They have a weird film at the back of their eyes that absorbs more light and their pupils dilate wildly – that’s why cats’ eyes glow creepily in the dark and they can run really fast at night without falling into holes or smacking into things.
I’m not sure how creationists (I refuse to capitalise the ‘c’, sorry) explain this sort of stuff, because to be honest the few times I’ve wasted precious foraging time talking to them I’ve come away feeling as though beating myself over the head with a leather sap would have been a better use of my time. I suppose they might say that magpies know where to dig because Jesus tells them. I did in fact have one guy answer pretty much every question I asked with ‘because Jesus made it that way’. If that thought lets you sleep better at night, fine. But for me it’s insanely limiting. I find evolution fascinating, whether Darwin was one-hundred percent right or not. I enjoy wondering why a magpie knows where to dig and then investigating it. I think it’s insulting to an animal to simply shrug it off as ‘well, it was created that way’. I refuse to believe that. Magpies, and other species that have survived through the millennia, have worked hard to hone their skills and fend off the brutality of the natural order that seeks to eliminate the weak at every opportunity and replace them with the strong. If I can help in some small way by throwing the odd handful of cheese, then I’m happy to. Hell, my magpies have even adapted to that – they now come right up to my back door and warble their little asses off to see if I’m home, and on days I’m not, I find twenty or thirty small holes in the ground in my backyard. On the days I throw cheese they dig less because their bellies get full sooner – it’s a more productive use of their precious foraging time. If that’s not evolving, I don’t know what is.
