Animal Talk: Breaking the Codes of Animal Language (Animal Talk series) - Softcover

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Tim Friend was senior science writer for USA Today for 13 years.. During his thirteen-year career at the newspaper, he has covered a broad range of topics including archaeology, anthropology, physics, astronomy, nature, biotechnology and genetics. He has reported stories from Mount Everest, Antarctica, the Arctic Circle, the Amazon Rain Forest, the Middle East, Central America and from a one-person submersible on the ocean floor. In addition to his work with USA Today, he has written for numerous national magazines, including National Wildlife and Men's Health, and traveled to Afghanistan to report on the war there. He lives in Washington, D.C.

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Chapter One: A Walk in the Park: Toward a Universal Language

Just before midnight, I crawl off my hammock and slip quietly from under the blessed drapes of mosquito netting. The kerosene lanterns have been dimmed to barely a flicker across the long raised wooden platform that serves as our base camp in the tropical rain forest of northwestern Peru. The platform is in the center of a clearing next to the bank of a small tributary that feeds into the Napo River half a mile away. I arrived with four other journalists and a guide late in the afternoon after hiking through the muddy and tangled jungle since early morning. We have joined two scientists, a few camp cooks, and the drunken pilot of a Cessna seaplane, who arrived just before dinner. The pilot is supposed to give us a flyover of the region first thing after breakfast. As much Johnny Walker Red scotch as he was putting away tonight, he'll still be drunk when we take off on the river early in the morning. The bush pilot's creed is, If you can't fly drunk, you can't fly.

This is my first trip to the Amazon rain forest. The closest I have come to a jungle until now is the tangled thicket of the Ozarks, where I grew up. Surprisingly, there are a lot of similarities, especially in the number of things that bite, sting, scratch, and burn. At the moment, the others in the expedition party are snoring. But that isn't why I'm awake. There's a raucous party going on -- with lots of wild action by the strange and wondrous creatures all around our campsite. The night is teeming with sounds that seem louder and more intriguing than anything I have ever heard.

A minute ago, high in the canopy just beyond the camp's perimeter, something big crashed through the leaves. The only creature large enough around here to make such noise is a sloth. True to its name, it does not seem to be in much of a hurry. Bats have been fluttering since dusk through the rafters of the thatched roof above the platform. Earlier this evening, one swooped down and snatched a tarantula that was crawling up a colleague's mosquito netting. We could hear a soft crunch as the bat caught the spider with its teeth and darted off with its dinner into the night.

Beyond the camp, in vibrant surround sound, tree frogs and insects are laying down a soulful, energetic chorus like a choir at an old-fashioned Southern tent revival. Unfamiliar birds and nocturnal monkeys overlay the chorus with melodies and their own unique lyrics. This is one party I am not going to miss despite the rather condescending warning of the scientists not to leave camp alone at night. We could get lostor worse, they cautioned. I spend quite a bit of time in the field, but no matter where I travel, scientists tend to treat journalists like bad children who need constant supervision. Their admonishment only heightens my resolve to sneak out of camp.

The main attraction of this remote spot in the jungle is a canopy walkway constructed with ladders and suspension bridges that leads 115 feet straight up to the tops of the trees. Ordinarily, getting to the upper canopy entails climbing with harnesses and ropes. This is no simple task and usually involves close encounters of the unpleasant kind with nasty things that sting, burn, and bite. The canopy walkway, which bears a strong resemblance to the Swiss family Robinson's tree house, is a vast improvement on grappling and slapping one's way up. As far as I know, only a few of these walkways exist in the world. Tonight, this one is going to be my stairway to heaven.

I am on a mission and have a woefully short time to fulfill it: to learn how animals communicate with each other and what they spend so much time chattering to each other about. At this point, my quest seems absolutely overwhelming. Real experts devote entire careers to studying a single species of animal and are still left with many more questions than answers at the end of the day. My head is full of questions, too, which I plan to explore and explain in this book: If animal behavior is mostly instinctual, as scientists generally thought for more than a hundred years, why do animals need to communicate? If animals are thinking creatures and capable of emotions, as a growing number of scientists now believe, do their signals convey information (similar to our words)? Or are animals merely snarling or cooing to manipulate each other's behavior to get something they want (as we also often do)? How did the colorful, noisy, and smelly signals of the animal kingdom arise in the first place? Is any animal system of communication similar to human language? Do animals ever lie or attempt to deceive each other when communicating? Do the chirps, barks, and roars of different species have anything in common or follow predictable rules or patterns? Can a bird understand a monkey? Do species learn to communicate or is it all programmed by genes? To what extent is human communication, both verbal and nonverbal, programmed into our genes?

Scientists have been asking questions like these and working hard at finding the answers for more than a century, but there have been an enormous number of recent discoveries about animal communication. Studies on communication among tree frogs alone could fill a book. The eminent sociobiologist E. O. Wilson and the entomologist Bert Hölldobler produced a 732-page tome devoted to ants. I have three books in my home library on cichlid fishes, seven devoted to primates, five on dogs, more than a dozen on various species of birds. Most books focus on a single behavior, such as courtship rituals among birds, or the social behavior of primates, or the chemical signals of insects.

Yet surprisingly few books written for the general public have focused on the great range of animal communication. Usually, these books devote only a chapter or two to songs, dances, and scents. So my challenge here is to draw from the wealth of research conducted by hundreds of scientists and present the bigger picture of animal talk in the wild. The Amazon rain forest seemed like the best place to get a full immersion in nature and to begin eavesdropping on some animal conversations.

The few remaining unspoiled rain forests of the world are nature's Manhattan, London, and Tokyo -- bustling organic metropolises with their own laws that govern every creature equally from conception through life and into death. The laws of nature demand procreation and a fight for survival, but the means developed to achieve those ends are tremendously varied. Mother Nature has fostered all manner of societies, cultures, learning, gaming, altruism, deception, cooperation, competition, industries, arms races, and intelligence. Look closely at any habitat and you can find daily dramas involving struggles between predators and prey, elaborate courtships, covert copulations, sibling rivalries, struggles for dominance, defense of territories, and many, many opportunities to arrive at a premature death. The same dramas are played out all over the world in every environment, from the deep ocean vents where microscopic life may have begun to the lawns and shrubs only a few steps away in the backyard.