DR MARIE GAFFNEY

Speciation, learning, instinct, guilds, ecological niches, island biogeography, conservation, phylogeography – these are the categorisations that concern me in my research. My specific area of interest is vocalisation. Last year I chaired a conference in Malta on the syringeal function in the roseate tern. My PhD interrogated cultural heterogeneity among populations of this species of songbird and its geographically specific correlation with human dialects. Every scientific field of research contains these ‘big’ words and phrases that we simply don’t use on a daily basis to order a coffee or speak to our neighbours. In my area, avian research, we use these big words like a mechanic would use the names of their tools to speak to another mechanic – they are simply tools that help a community to communicate meaning among each other. But if I’m not speaking in a language you understand, well, then I can’t communicate what I mean to you. So I’m gonna drop the big words because effective communication happens in the language of the receiver, which is kind of what the next twenty minutes will be about.

My name is Dr Marie Gaffney, and I am an ornithologist from University College Cork, in Ireland. I study birds. This year I’m honoured to say that I was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology. In this TED Talk, I’d like to take you through the work over the past sixteen months that lead to this achievement.

Humans and birds have evolved alongside each other over millions of years. We share a commonality in that our two species both use complex vocalisations to communicate within our communities. But what most don’t know is that we communicate between our species too. When birds sing, we experience this as quite soothing and calming, whether it be the long chirps of a robin or the more melodic song of thrushes. When we hear these sounds, they make us feel happy, make us pause and take note of our other senses, such as smell or sight. When I’m out having a walk through a park and I stop to hear birds sing, I naturally take a big deep breath, and I notice the colours of the leaves or the angle of the sun, I smell the dew, the flowers, the grass.

Birdsong instantly takes us to a very meditative, mindful and contemplative state. This is no coincidence. Our brains evolved a symbiotic relationship with bird vocalisations. For our early ancestors, not only was birdsong nature’s alarm clock, but the sound of birds kept us safe. When the birds stopped singing in the trees, it meant that a predator was near. The birds would go quiet to protect themselves and our brains slowly evolved to react to this. Even today, one of the first lessons that our militaries receive in field training is to stay on guard when the birds are quiet, as it could mean a hidden ambush. When birds don’t sing, we sense an eeriness or creepiness. This is our brains and nervous system telling us to be on high alert. We’ve all heard the myth that the birds don’t sing in Auschwitz. But when birds do sing, we feel safe, we can relax, chill out.

Birdsong also keeps us sharp and pepped up, in the positive sense, not like we’re on edge – it makes us feel alive and ready to tackle work. I mentioned nature’s alarm clock. Well, humans are diurnal, as opposed to nocturnal. Interestingly, our diurnal behaviour evolved alongside birds – our brains wake up when stimulated with avian vocalisation. Birdsong works because it’s stochastic, made up of lots and lots of random sounds. Its rhythms don’t repeat; there are no patterns. And the human mind is obsessed with pattern. Stare into some big fluffy clouds long enough and you’ll convince yourself that you see shapes of people and things. We attribute meaning to random coincidences. We create geometric balance in our art, fashion, our architecture. Our aesthetic values centre around balance, geometry and pattern. Some say that our existence itself is entirely random chaos and so we invent the idea of a creator, God, just to tolerate the ambiguity of meaninglessness and uncertainty. But we won’t get into that today. We strive for pattern. Our engrossment in patterns is necessary for recognising other humans’ faces and remembering and categorising them as friends, lovers, family, enemies etc., which makes our ability to recognise patterns quite a complex cognitive function and one that is necessary for such a social animal as the human.

But birdsong undercuts our pattern-recognition capabilities. It’s too random – we can never find the patterns, which is why it keeps our powerful brains alert and awake. My good friend Dr Tungsten Gulp, who is an evolutionary musicologist in the University of Berkley, California, posits that music evolved because of humans’ frustration with the random nature of birdsong. He suggests that we rationalised and altered birdsong into the categorical patterns of geometric melody, rhythm and scales that we call music. But my work over the past 42 months, ladies and gentlemen, isn’t in the area of how the vocalisations of birds impact humans – that’s a very well-researched area. My work is quite the opposite of that.

The city of Cork in Ireland is a place that I have called my home for the past eleven years. It’s where I researched my PhD and it’s where I work, in UCC. Soon after I moved down from Dublin, I began to notice that the birds of Cork were especially agitated and aggressive in their behaviour towards humans. Crows in particular fly from buildings several times a day and attack the people of the city. I initially assumed that I was just being hyper-observant of the behaviour of birds, considering that ornithology is my area of study. This changed, however, one morning on MacCurtain Street. I had just gotten my coffee and began to scrutinise the behaviour of three Brent geese. Their feathers were puffing, and they were cackling and displaying signs of aggression. However, they were three females and there were no male geese present, nor were there any chicks, which made this aggressive display particularly out of character. They directed their attention towards two men who were unloading coal from a lorry. The engine of the lorry was particularly loud, so the men were shouting over it to be heard. They were arguing about the price of shoes. As the men returned to the van, the three Brent geese made a beeline for the cabin, which had open windows. All three geese began to attack the men in the cabin of the lorry as it drove off, pecking at their faces and flapping their wings. The lorry then bashed into a wall at the bottom of MacCurtain Street, narrowly missing the River Lee. Two of the geese fled into the river. I rushed towards the accident to see if I needed to ring an ambulance. Sadly, one of the geese had died in the crash. The men were unharmed.

‘Are you lads OK?’ I asked.

One of the men, whose face was black from coal, replied, ‘Third time in a fortnight, ma’am. The birds in Cork are stone mad. They must be from Limerick or something.’ He gestured at the other man, who was throwing the dead goose’s body over the wall and into the river below. ‘His brother was nearly choked by a wren who flew into his mouth last week as he cycled back from the bookies’ office.’

I returned to my research office, rattled by what I’d seen. I was most definitely spotting a pattern of bird aggression in the city of Cork, but could not understand why this was happening. My first instinct was water pollution, as Cork Harbour has many factories that could cause an excess of mercury to find its way into rainfall and ground water. Heavy metals are known to injure the avian brain, which could possibly explain excessive aggression in Corkonian birds. However, my theory was dashed when I began to search the local archives for bird attacks in the city of Cork. There were several a year as far back as the local papers would go, which was 1778 and therefore far pre-dated the arrival of mercury into the Cork water supply. In 1817 the Lord Mayor of Cork was killed by a heron. A hurler was blinded by an osprey in 1868. Seagulls caused several injuries at a communion party in Blackpool in 1925. There were too many incidents to list here. When I searched hospital records, I found thousands of bird attacks, dating back centuries. When I contrasted these attacks against records for the rest of Ireland, the results were dumbfounding. Outside of Cork, there was maybe one incident every ten years, which would be considered completely normal within ornithological circles. There was most definitely an epidemic of bird attacks in Cork city, and Cork city alone. I tested every possible angle – diet, air quality, elevation, habitat – and came up empty-handed.

Then, one night, I was listening to recordings of the song of a speckled wren. I have a piece of software that analyses and categorises bird-call. It measures tone, frequency and rhythm, and extrapolates this into an algorithm. Remember what I said earlier, about what the human brain couldn’t do with birdsong? Well, my software does what the human brain can’t, it analyses the stochastic patterns of a bird’s song, and extracts algorithms from it. While I was working, the radio was playing in the background. It was local DJ Neil Prenderville, and he had a caller on who was complaining about young people setting fire to his bin. As the song of the wren played over this caller, my software began to behave abnormally, and the fan of my laptop got overheated. The software crashed. I immediately shoved my dictaphone to the speaker of the radio and recorded the man who was talking about the bins.

The next day, I brought this recording to the much more powerful computer in the UCC ornithology department. I ran both the song of the wren and the caller from Cork complaining about the bins into the analytical software, and my suspicion was confirmed. The Cork accent contained identical random tones to that of birdsong. For those of you here who are not Irish, I need to explain the Cork accent. It is highly unique. Cork people sound like they are singing when they speak – not in a pleasant way, but in an arbitrary, discordant way. It has been described by a colleague as tonally similar to a baby with adult lungs, crying for his nappy to be changed while simultaneously complaining jealously that his friend has received a bigger ice-pop. My dear friend Dr Barrington Talent, who sadly passed recently, gave what I think is the most accurate description of the Cork accent: ‘It is like a scolded Alsatian whimpering on the roof of a car that passes from your right to left at such a speed that the Doppler effect is apparent.’ It is, as you may have gathered, a strange accent.

I presented my hypothesis of the Cork accent’s relationship to birdsong to my superiors and a research trial began immediately. One of the conveniences of working in a university. We tested a sample group of 250 people from Cork city and analysed their speech. I was correct. But what was even more interesting was that we found that in the way that birdsong is relaxing to the brains of humans, the Cork accent, with its erratic, rising and dipping nasal tone, is highly irritating to the brains of birds. It seems to interfere with their means of communicating with each other. Birds use call to warn of danger, to find a mate, to protect their territory and to let others know that food is nearby. They depend upon the ability to communicate through vocalisation for basic survival. This system almost completely breaks down when a Cork person is nearby. The proximity of a Cork person is a highly irritating experience, which causes the poor animal to defend itself aggressively. To put it in human terms, imagine trying to conduct your daily business while another person incessantly follows you with a party horn and points it directly into your ear. You’d feel like hitting them, wouldn’t you? This is what it’s like for a cormorant or a rook when they hear a Cork person talk about why the Cork Jazz festival is proof that Cork is the most cultured city in Ireland, or why the English Market is better than anything offering similar wares in Dublin. Birds cannot stand Cork people. I published a paper on my findings, and it was received warmly in the ornithological community. But it was not this research that got me the Nobel Prize.

So the Cork accent is annoying to birds. Great, I thought. Pretty interesting. But ultimately, this discovery didn’t improve the lives of birds or humans. The research was published in many Cork newspapers, in the ‘In Other News’ section. But unanimously the people of Cork agreed that they would rather keep their accent and continue being attacked by birds than ‘give some bitch down from Dublin the pleasure of changing our culture’. I gave up, and went through a period of depression. My greatest study was pretty much just an interesting fact, with no useful applications.

I returned to research to investigate the declining numbers of spotted flycatchers in Ireland. The spotted flycatcher is a small brown bird, so called because it eats flying insects and its juveniles have a breast-pattern of brown spots. It’s one of Ireland’s migratory species, and makes a yearly round trip to Africa. Since 2003, the numbers in Ireland had been declining rapidly. Researchers in Maynooth discovered that this was as a result of the growth in population of a mosquito species that carried a parasite which attacked the livers of the spotted flycatcher. Global warming in Ireland was most definitely responsible for this. The birds were eating the mosquitos and succumbing to the parasite. This parasite was reducing the population by as much as 5% each year, and its effect appeared to be growing exponentially, meaning that the spotted flycatcher would most definitely become extinct in the next fifty years. Not only would this be very sad, but it would be detrimental for the Irish ecosystem, which relies on this bird to control the insect population. The Maynooth researchers discovered it was possible to administer a prophylactic to the bird, which would cause its liver to reject the parasite. This could be delivered via water, either through drinking or bathing. However, the spotted flycatcher is an elusive and incredibly swift bird, so catching one through traditional means would be quite difficult and depletive of resources and manpower. The Irish ornithological community was banging its head against the wall.

One day in the canteen of UCC, I was having some small-talk with my colleague Dr Liam Flag, who is a professor of engineering. I was telling him about the spotted flycatcher and he was telling me about his current research. He was investigating alternative methods of propulsion and fuel, in particular an idea for powering an engine using the vibrations created from sound. I was highly intrigued by this, I thought it was an excellent example of outside-the-box thinking. I said goodbye to Liam and went back to my office to rack my brains about liver parasites.

Then a flash hit me, in relation to Liam’s sound propulsion research. What if there was a vehicle, not one powered by noise, but that generated noise? Cork noises? I thought, if the spotted flycatcher is so difficult to catch, then why can’t I make them come to me? I immediately called Dr Liam Flag with my idea and we soon got to work on sourcing funding for the proposal, which was not difficult. I began to identify the areas in Ireland in which there were known habitats and populations of spotted flycatchers. They were to be found in most of Ireland below Mullingar, in wooded areas.

I then examined the spotted flycatcher’s call, and evaluated this sonically with the accents of some test subjects from Cork. The Cork accent counteracted the flycatcher’s song only when conversing about certain topics. This was to be expected. Gannets, for instance, are only enraged by the conversations of Cork people when they speak about architecture. The topics that were found to trigger an emotional reaction in the spotted flycatcher were: giving tips on which horses to put money on, speaking about the importance of Cork nightclub Sir Henry’s influence on the Irish music scene, complaining about how sick your dog is, and listing out the sizes and types of drill bits available in a hardware shop. I recorded such conversations, and played them back to some live spotted flycatcher specimens that were being kept in a cage in UCC. The birds only showed mild irritation, which was quite disappointing. I was not giving up, however, so I brought three live Cork people into the laboratory and asked them to speak freely about the aforementioned topics. The flycatchers became incredibly aggressive and tried to break free from the cage, attempting to attack the human specimens. This was something I had overlooked in my initial research. The ear canal of a bird doesn’t respond as readily to recorded sounds. The voice of an actual Cork person is a necessary factor. If this wasn’t the case, a crow would fly down your chimney any time Ronan O’Gara was on television.

I took this research to Dr Liam Flag, who began to design a vehicle. Behind me are some photographs of the Cork Man Bird Van. As you can see, the vehicle is heavily armoured. Liam was inspired by the design of security vans and riot vans. The front cabin seats two people, and the windshield and side windows are protected by a substantial metal cage. That’s where Liam and I sat throughout the expedition. But things get really interesting when you look at the back of the van. As you can see, it has very thick metal plating with no holes. This was a titanium–aluminium alloy, for strength but also to remain lightweight. It was imperative that the vehicle remained light, to minimise refuelling. Jutting out from the top are four wide-mouthed sound cones, which are essentially modified trombones. If you look at the cross-section of the van in the next slide, you’ll notice four barefoot Cork men standing upright, with their heads tilted back towards the ceiling. Their necks are tied to the belts of their trousers using rappel cord. Just above their mouths are the openings of the trombones. It is into these receivers that they spoke. Their voices were then acoustically projected outside the van, with a more significant increase in volume than usually afforded by the mechanics of the human voice box, achieving twenty decibels at various stages of measurement. This was very impressive, considering there was no electronic assistance boosting the signal of their voices. The four Cork men stood barefoot on a metal hotplate, which was turned on at irregular intervals to keep them talking and prevent them from falling asleep.

On this slide is a map of the journey we took around Ireland. As you can see, we essentially circumnavigated the country, in a clockwise direction starting at Cork and ending in Waterford. Doing this gave the amplified sound of the Cork men’s voices an audible circumference of several hundred miles to reach the ears of spotted flycatchers. Our journey was also influenced by the locations of the largest electrical pylons in the country as marked on a map given to us by the Electricity Supply Board. There was a reason for this. We timed the journey for early September, because this was when the spotted flycatcher population were congregating in large flocks on telephone wires and pylons across Ireland, getting ready to make their winter trip to South Africa. We were fully aware that once they heard the Cork accents attuned to their specific frequency, the flycatchers would become highly irritated and attack the van. Our plan would hopefully attract as many flycatchers as possible. The journey began at 6 a.m. in Douglas in Cork city.

Cork Man Number 1, Oliver Kenny, was instructed to talk about how sick his dog was until we reached Galway. If he stopped at any point, the hotplate was turned on to a high temperature. His pre-prepared statement read as follows: My ould dog is pure sick, sir, I don’t know what’s wrong with her at all. She’s been turning away Pedigree Chum. Feel her neck, boy. Feel it. Can you feel a lump under her neck? That wasn’t there last week. My poor ould dog, boy. She’s after getting up a load of sick across the road, boy. Over therela. Watch it over therela, go and look into it, beside that manhole cover, watch it.

Mr Kenny delivered this in an incredibly whiny and annoying timbre, with a slowly rising tone. His words travelled far and penetrated the countryside in his shatteringly shrill amplified Cork brogue. After thirty minutes of broadcasting this statement continuously, there were several hundred flycatchers in pursuit of the van. We travelled at a speed of 120 km/h and could not stop, or else the birds would envelope the van and halt it. By the time we got to Galway, we were met on the road by a motorbike with a fuel tank. Borrowing from the practices of commercial aviation, we re-fuelled via a hose, while still moving.

Cork Man Number 2 then took over the duty of recitation. Bart Flaherty began reading his paragraph about Sir Henry’s nightclub: I was there when Nirvana played, boy. I met my old doll there. Sonic Youth played as well. My ould doll got a photo with Dave Grohl, boy. Krist Novoselic asked for her number too. You’d never get that in Dublin, I swear. ‘The Ball and Chain’, you ever hear of that? It was a New Jersey acid-house song from 1993. Its real name was ‘Make This Love Right’. But we called it ‘The Ball and Chain’ in Cork. And the song was so popular in Cork that they changed the name to ‘The Ball and Chain’, because of Cork. And it went out of print on vinyl. And the lad who made it was called Romanthony – he’s dead now, but he used to mention Cork in interviews even though he was a black lad from New Jersey, and he played with Daft Punk. Pure Cork, boy.

This particular speech was delivered in a very superior fashion and succeeded in encouraging at least 15,000 spotted flycatchers to follow our Cork Man Bird Van. Several of the birds were swooping down on the van at this point, trying to gain access to the Cork men contained behind the steel plating. Unfortunately, this had the unintended result of some birds receiving injuries and one going underneath the van’s wheels entirely, so the decision was made to increase the speed to 160 km/h. We required a refuelling in Athlone as we traversed the midlands at ferocious speed, with 23,000 spotted flycatchers in aggressive pursuit. Several car accidents arose as a result of the expedition, and I feared for my life at times. The Cork men were getting tired and angry. We’d been travelling for six hours, and their feet were covered in blisters from the hotplate. When they protested, Dr Flag inserted a coat hanger through a square of wire-mesh on the front cabin and poked it into their ribs, so that they were made aware that they had no choice in the matter. To increase morale, they were each given 50 ml doses of Tanora to drink.

Careering through Cavan, Mr Robert Foley, Cork Man Number 3, read his statement, which was about drill bits: What type have you? I’ve a Black and Decker, boy. My uncle has a JCB one – I thought they only made machinery but they make drills as well. You should see his masonry bits. He’s got a box of counterbores too. He used it on drywall. He’s got a spade bit for wood, boy. He gave me a loan of his auger bits too. I’ll leave you have ’em for a few weeks if you pay me before you give ’em back. Wait till you see his plug-cutters.

By that point, there were over 100,000 spotted flycatchers chasing the Cork Man Bird Van. It was still daytime, but the sky was entirely black from the gigantic swarm that loomed above us. We reached the home stretch, having crossed the midlands, when we arrived on the east coast, in the town of Drogheda, travelling at 180 km/h. Our next destination was Waterford.

Cork Man Number 4, Mr Barry Collins, situated himself under the mouthpiece, the hot plate turned on to full as his feet hopped up and down, and delivered the final soliloquy, which was about backing horses: Wally’s Favourite Spastic, she’s not bad. Won four last Derby. I’d back her for twenty. There’s a few others for the 4.15 that’d grease your palm though, boy. There’s Gideon’s Retreat, Fuck my Spanish Husband, Salary Dandy, Portion Party, Jeffery Archer’s Far-fetched Car Park. Any of them are fine. Oh, and Guilty Fashanu too. You’ll buy me a Murphys if one wins, you will?

This was repeated approximately 64 times, and was successful in riling the remaining flycatcher population of Ireland. We reached Waterford with a quarter of a million birds in tow.

UCC scientists waited in a large field outside Tramore, accompanied by a number of fire engines. The fire engines’ tanks were filled with a diluted mixture of diethylcarbamazine and thiabendazole, which are anti-parasitic medications. In this slide, you can see that we grounded the Cork Man Bird Van in the centre of the fire engines. All four Cork men began reciting their prepared speeches, simultaneously, one last time. This drew the gigantic bird flock into a bitter frenzy. They began attacking the heavily armoured van. The hoses on the fire engines were turned on, dousing every spotted flycatcher in anti-parasitic medication and eradicating them entirely of any risk of liver parasites. The Cork men were instructed to cease broadcast, at which point the birds left for their South African migration. They will return next summer, immune to the liver parasite and thus capable of controlling the Irish mosquito population.

It was for this work of conservation, for saving the Irish flycatcher, that I received the Nobel Prize. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, you have been a wonderful audience. Enjoy the rest of the TED Talks.