Controllers at Full Sutton Airfield, near North Yorkshire, attempted to guide O’Neill to the runway. He flew right past it. Growing more stressed each minute, he sounded confused and his speech was slurred. That and the sudden blindness pointed to one thing: O’Neill had suffered a stroke.
THE WING MAN
The U.K.’s Royal Air Force overheard the mayday call and offered to send help. A few minutes later, Wing Commander Paul Gerrard, the chief flying instructor from nearby Linton-on-Ouse Base, flew his Tucano T1 turboprop plane to within a few hundred feet of the Cessna. “Mr. O’Neill,” he said over the radio, “I’m going to take you back to my base.” Gerrard then kept in constant contact with O’Neill for the 20-mile trip, giving him course corrections along the way: “Left a bit, right, descend, level, left.” (Gerrard had to fly in a zigzag pattern to keep from zooming past the much slower Cessna.) By the time the two planes reached Linton, O’Neill was having trouble keeping his composure. He kept apologizing for all the trouble he was causing and worried that he’d crash onto people on the ground. “Everything’s going to be fine, Jim. Just keep listening to me. Now, you’re above the airstrip, can you see it?”
“No,” replied O’Neill. “I’m sorry, sir, I just can’t see.”
Of the two choices available—try to talk him down, or send him to a secluded area to crash where no one else could get hurt—Gerrard and the base personnel never even mentioned the latter choice. “We’re going to get you down safely, Mr. O’Neill. You just have to follow my instructions to the tee.”
Ancient Egyptians shaved their armpits and used citrus-cinnamon deodorant.
THE APPROACH
Once O’Neill aligned his plane with the runway, he was able to begin his descent. In order to land safely, however, a pilot must have visual contact with the ground. O’Neill couldn’t even see his instruments, let alone the ground, so he pulled up at the last second. “No worries,” said Gerrard. “Let’s turn around and we’ll try again.” And they did—six more times. On a couple of the attempts, the plane bounced off the runway; on others O’Neill pulled up early, apologizing each time. Gerrard was patient, though, as both planes had enough fuel to remain up there for a long time. But O’Neill was the wild card: No one knew how much longer he could keep flying. What they did know was that a second stroke near the base and neighboring village could mean disaster, so they had no choice but to keep trying.
Finally, on the seventh attempt, more than 45 minutes after Gerrard took O’Neill’s wing, the Cessna hit the runway hard and bounced back up. O’Neill was able to keep it steady; the plane bounced again on the runway and started veering to the right, then hit ground a third time—and stayed down. O’Neill engaged the brake and the Cessna rolled to a stop in the grass…without a scratch. When paramedics met him at the plane, he was confused and disoriented but otherwise uninjured.
THE REUNION
O’Neill spent several weeks at the hospital and several months recovering. By the following April, his vision started slowly improving. He still couldn’t fly a plane or even drive a car, but a friend flew him—in the very same Cessna—to Linton so he could finally meet (and see) his rescuers. Gerrard was humble about the ordeal: “I was glad to help a fellow aviator in distress, but I was just part of a team. There were 12 people working at the base that day that helped get Jim safely back on the ground.”
“I owe my life to the RAF,” said O’Neill, “as well as the lives of those dozens of people I could have crash-landed on.”
Best man at Adam Sandler’s wedding: his English bulldog, Meatball.
HOW TO TICKLE A TROUT
Here’s an intriguing “art” that dates back to the days when most Americans lived in rural areas: catching trout with your bare hands. (And to learn how to hypnotize a chicken, turn to page 371.)
STEP 1. Figure out where the trout are hiding. When trout are startled or need to rest, they seek shelter in areas that offer protection from predators, such as underneath submerged rocks or logs. Or, on stretches of a river or stream bank, the bank may be “undercut”—there may be a recessed area beneath the bank where trout hide. If the water is brimming with trout, the easiest way to find their hiding places may be to simply follow them. Walk along the bank, keeping an eye out for movement. The trout are also keeping an eye out for you, and when they see you, they will head for shelter.
STEP 2. When you find a spot where the trout may be hiding, approach slowly and carefully to avoid scaring them out of their hiding place. Position yourself so that you can reach down into the water and touch the fish. In the case of an undercut bank, you can lie down on the bank with one arm in the water.
STEP 3. Slowly and carefully feel around for trout. If you do make contact with one, slowly tickle its underside, just forward of the tail fin, with your forefinger. This will start to calm the fish.
STEP 4. Slowly tickle your way forward along the underside of the trout. This will calm the fish further, putting it into a trance-like state. When you’ve tickled your way up to the gills, you should be able to grab the trout without much trouble. Toss it on the bank. (If you’re strictly tickle-and-release, throw it back in the water.)
FISHY BUSINESS
Trout tickling is a surprisingly effective technique once you get the hang of it. So effective, in fact, that it’s considered a form of poaching in the U.K. and punishable by a fine equivalent to about $4,000. Why so high? Tickle-poachers fish without equipment, and that makes them difficult to catch. They have to be caught “wet-handed,” while they’re lying at the water’s edge with one hand in the water.
Highest U.S. lake: Pacific Tarn, in the Colorado Rockies (13,420 feet above sea level).
BIRD BRAINS, PART II
In Part I, we told you about some really intelligent birds. But most of them are lame ducks compared to these avian Einsteins. (Part I is on page 44.)
CAWS AND EFFECT
The world’s most intelligent bird: According to ornithologists, it’s the common crow. Surprised? As we noted earlier, eagles and vultures use rocks to break open hard-shelled eggs. Urban crows do kind of the same thing to open hard walnut shells, only they utilize cars. At busy intersections in cities around the world, they’ve been observed standing on the sidewalks alongside pedestrians, waiting for the light to change. When it does, the crows hop to the middle of the street and drop a few walnuts. Then they hop back to safety, wait for the light to turn green, and watch as the cars drive over the nuts, cracking them open. When the light turns red again, the crows hop back into the street and collect their meals.
BY HOOK OR BY ROOK
All members of the corvid family—crows, ravens, rooks, magpies, jackdaws, and jays—are intelligent, but none more so than crows and ravens. Much of what we know about these birds comes from two of the world’s leading corvid researchers, Nathan Emery and Nicky Clayton. Their most famous experiment took place in 2002 when they studied New Caledonian crows, native to the South Pacific. The researchers placed a small canister full of insects inside a slim glass beaker and challenged a crow named Betty to get it out so she could eat the insects: There was a little wire loop on top of the canister, but Betty couldn’t reach it with her beak; next to the beaker was a straight piece of wire. She picked it up and stuck it inside the beaker, but couldn’t lift up the canister. What Betty did next stunned the scientific community: She pressed the piece of wire against the tabletop a few times and bent it into a small hook. Then she used the hook to remove the canister.
Clayton and Emery concluded, “Some corvids are not only superior in intelligence to birds of other avian species, but also rival many nonhuman primates.”
If all the freight trains in the U.S. were lined up, they’d cross the country six times.
WINGING IT
It’s impressive that Betty taught herself how to bend that piece of wire, but it’s not that much of a stretch—crows regularly construct tools in the wild. Like chimpanzees, for example, they remove leaves from twigs to scoop up i
nsects. But another sign of intelligence is whether an animal can be taught to do something it doesn’t do in the wild. Mammals are good at this. (Think of a bear riding a bicycle.) Rooks, another species of corvid, don’t use tools in the wild. Could they be taught to do so in a lab?
In 2009 Emery and another researcher, Christopher David Bird (really), put one of Aesop’s fables to the test: In “The Crow and the Pitcher,” the crow throws stones into a pitcher until the water level is high enough for him to take a drink. They set up the same scenario for the rooks and demonstrated how it worked. The rooks observed and, according to Emery, “All four subjects solved the problem with an appreciation of precisely how many stones were needed.” Three of the rooks figured out pretty quickly that large rocks work better than small ones. These findings showed that rooks have a “flexible ability” to use tools—they can improvise and learn from their mistakes, both signs of higher intelligence. “Clayton and Emery’s work has opened up ways of looking at the role of learning from experience,” said Uta Frith, a neuroscientist at University College London. “Birds are providing an imperfect but extremely revealing mirror to us. They let us see the behaviors we most treasure as part of being human in a new light.”
OUT OF SIGHT, NOT OUT OF MIND
One of those human behaviors is mental time travel—the ability to call on memories of past experiences to guide future actions. Dr. Clayton observed mental time travel in corvids one day while she was outside having lunch at the University of California, Davis. Scrub jays (smaller cousins of the crow) would battle each other for food scraps and then hide them in caches—storage places such as small holes in the ground and under shrubs. But after all the jays flew away, a few returned by themselves and rehid their scraps in new caches. Did the birds come back because they knew they were previously being watched by other birds who wanted to steal their food? If so, that would qualify as mental time travel.
About 1 out of every 20 people with asthma are also allergic to aspirin.
Clayton and Emery decided to test this theory in the lab. The jays who knew they were being watched by other birds when they hid their food returned later and re-hid it. The control group that wasn’t watched left the food in the original hiding places. The scientists’ conclusion: “Since re-caching is not dependent on the potential thief being present, the experienced jay must be using some cognitive ability to perform this behavior.” Again, this is a behavior that, until recently, was thought to only occur in mammals.
Here are two more examples of higher thinking in crows.
• Crow hunters have reported that if three hunters enter a hunting blind, the crows will fly away and won’t return to the area until not one, not two, but all three hunters have left. That puts the bird in a very exclusive animal kingdom club: those that can count.
• Another trait thought to be uniquely mammalian is the ability to enjoy things for pleasure. Crows have been witnessed collecting bright objects such as coins and hiding them away. Biologists can find no evolutionary or survival motive for this action except that the birds just seem to like shiny things.
SCARY CROWS
To say that crows have adapted to living alongside humans is an understatement. They thrive in rural areas, cities, and suburbs. And to many people—and other animals—they’re a nuisance.
• For millennia, farmers have been trying to scare crows away from their fields. Here’s an excerpt from an 1881 book, Household Cyclopedia of General Information, by Henry Hartshorne:
Machinery of various kinds, such as wind-mills in miniature, horse rattles, etc., to be put in motion by the wind, are often employed to frighten crows; but with all of these they soon become familiar. The most effectual method of banishing them from a field is the frequent use of the musket.
• In their quest to find food and nesting materials, urban crows are smart, creative, and relentless. They empty trash cans, terrorize pedestrians, and have even knocked out high-speed Internet networks by stealing wires from control boxes. In one case in Japan, a crow was blamed for shutting down a bullet train. Since 2000, game officials in Tokyo have killed more than 100,000 crows, but they remain a daily problem.
What are murmets, hodmedods, and tattie bogles? Different names for scarecrows in England.
• In Cape Cod, Massachusetts, endangered piping plovers nest on the beaches, but crows eat their eggs. Conservation officials built protective cages over the plover nests, expecting that the cages would keep out the crows but allow the smaller birds to come and go. The officials might as well have painted big bull’s-eyes on the nests. Now the crows simply land hard on top of the cages and rattle them until the spooked plovers abandon their nests…and become easy crows’ meals themselves. In 2010 the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced a plan to set up fake plover nests (without cages) that contain poisoned hard-boiled eggs. They’re counting on the crows being intelligent enough to make the connection that eating the plovers’ eggs will kill them. The question yet to be answered: Are the crows smart enough to discern between the real nests and the fake nests?
QUOTH THE RAVEN
All birds use complex forms of communication, but crows and ravens may actually use rudimentary forms of language. When you hear that cacophony of caws in the morning, that’s the group of crows or ravens discussing where to go look for food. However, deciphering the subtle differences between corvid alarm calls, assembly calls, distress calls, and their other vocalizations has proven difficult. According to the University of Vermont’s professor emeritus of biology Bernd Heinrich, who authored several books about ravens: “Our research has been something like that of aliens from outer space who make sonograms of human vocalizations. Certain differences noted in frequency, intonation, and loudness are correlated with feelings and emotions. But human sounds convey much more, and perhaps ravens’ do, too.” One particular behavior that has led scientists to believe that ravens may use language is their distinctive regional dialects. When ravens from different areas meet, it takes some time for them to learn each other’s calls.
A few ravens have even learned to mimic the human voice. Of course, there’s one bird order known for this skill: the Psittaciformes, or “true” parrots, which include lories, cockatoos, and parakeets. And their intelligence level ranks close to corvids.
To read about the world’s most learned parrot, as well as some other amazing avian abilities, migrate on over to page 416.
Jesus most likely had short hair, as that was the popular style at the time.
WEIRD CRIME
This year’s surreal selections of scurrilous scofflaws features sausages, superheroes, a snake, and the seeds of a dandelion.
THE MISSING LINKS
After a 23-year-old man named He finished his meal at a restaurant in the Chinese city of Benxi, he grabbed the owner’s daughter, pulled out a knife, and demanded all the cash from the register. Some of the other patrons overpowered He and held him until help arrived. When the police came, He opened his shirt to reveal what looked like a belt of tube-shaped bombs around his chest. Officers rushed He outside and called the bomb squad. “When they arrived,” said an officer, “they laughed out loud as they quickly realized the explosives were actually sausages.” He later explained that he came up with the idea when he looked in his refrigerator: “The sausages looked liked bombs, so I decided to try it.”
SAVE THE LAST TRANCE
“You are getting sleepy.” That’s the last thing the women told police they could remember before they regained their senses and discovered their cash registers were empty. The strange crime spree took place at several banks and supermarkets in northern Italy in 2008, and so far the suspect has eluded capture. Although experts say that this kind of hypnotism is impossible—you can’t just walk up to someone and with a single command and get her to do your nefarious bidding—surveillance footage clearly shows the man (who police say “bears a striking resemblance to Saddam Hussein”) talk to the women and then simply reach into the register and
take the money. In each case, the svengali walked out with a wad of cash and a smile on his face.
A SEEDY NEIGHBORHOOD
In 2010 police in Hittfeld, Germany, received an emergency call from a boy who said that his eight-year-old friend had just been abducted by a man driving a Porsche. The cops put out an allpoints-bulletin and began a city-wide search. A few minutes later, the Porsche driver (age 47, name not released) walked into the police station dragging the kid behind him. The man said the boy had vandalized his Porsche. How? He was blowing dandelion seeds into the air and some of them “hit” the sports car. The boy was freed; the man was arrested and faces up to two years in prison.
During WWII, Josephine Baker smuggled photos of German military installations out of enemy territory by pinning them to her underwear.
JOE UNCOOL
“This has got to rank as one of the worst attempted jailbreaks ever,” said a prison official in Albany, Isle of Wight, England. The first problem: The perpetrator tried to break into the wrong prison (his cousin was incarcerated at a prison in a neighboring town). Second, the man’s weapon was a squirt gun. Third, the man—who tried to no avail to kick down a door—was wearing a Snoopy costume. “He wasn’t too conspicuous,” said the official.
SNAKE ATTACK!
In 2010 a guest in a Rock Hill, South Carolina, motel knocked on his neighbor’s door and asked the occupant, 29-year-old Tony Smith, to please turn down the music. Smith complied, and the other guest thought that was the end of it. It wasn’t. A few hours later, he stepped out of his room and saw Smith quickly walking toward him carrying a four-foot-long python. Then, according to police reports, “Smith hit him in the face with the snake’s head.” Smith was charged with assault and lost custody of the snake.
Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader@ Page 29