Vineyard Views: February 2021

The New York Review of Books has an interesting review of “What It’s Like to Be a Bird” by David Sibley. I don’t know much about birds, so I was amazed at some of the things birds can do. Some examples:

“Crows and parrots perform as well as dogs in tests of reasoning and learning.”

New Caledonian crows can assemble compound tools out of more than one element; children cannot do this until at least the age of five.

Birds see differently from us. They can see ultraviolet light.

Birds can hear a wider range of sounds than us. They communicate very actively by calls and songs. Calls enable them transmit socially important information, such as the approach of a dangerous predator. Birdsong contains more elaborate messages, usually related to breeding.

Nest-building techniques seem to be inherited, as they are constructed the same for generations whether in captivity or in the free world.

Often their memories are better than ours. “Clark’s nutcracker, a member of the crow family native to the mountains of the western United States, can hide over 30,000 seeds and recall their precise locations many months later. These birds not only can locate their food caches but also conceal them from rivals, and they know to retrieve first those likely to spoil.”

The bar-tailed godwit migrates every year from Alaska to New Zealand, a distance of over seven thousand miles. And, they do it non-stop.

I’ve never been aware of delivery of first class mail taking so long. My favorite example is my attempt to pay my credit card bill on time. Although it happened at Christmas, it took almost a month for the company to get my check; I had to talk them out of the late payment fee they had charged me. True, the holidays had some effect. But when I look at my bank account, I see that my checks are being cashed about 10 – 15 days after I have sent them. A package a friend of mine had mailed to Texas took months to arrive. One study in December found that nationwide delivery of first-class mail had fallen to 63.9% from 91.8% a year earlier. In Baltimore on-time delivery of first-class mail fell to less than 30% the day after Christmas.

And what is the Postmaster General Louis DeJoy planning to do? Roll out another slate of policies that would significantly hike postage rates and further slow the delivery of certain kinds of mail. The Post says he has more ideas - "preparing to put all first-class mail onto a single delivery track... a move that would mean slower and more costly delivery for both consumers and commercial mailers." Also, he has also "discussed plans to eliminate a tier of first-class mail—letters, bills, and other envelope-sized correspondence sent to a local address—designated for delivery in two days," the Washington Post reported. "Instead, all first-class mail would be lumped into the same three- to five-day window, the current benchmark for nonlocal mail." And, “the plan also prevents first-class mail from being shipped by airplane," the Post noted, "forcing all of it into trucks and a relay of distribution depots

We probably should have expected this as within weeks of taking office in mid-June last year, DeJoy imposed changes on U.S. Postal Service operations that produced plummeting on-time performance rates.