What Mirrors Tell Us About Animal Minds
A couple of weeks ago, an editor at The Guardian tweeted an image of a bald eagle staring at its reflection in a body of water. “This photo of an eagle taking a hard look at itself is not a metaphor for anything that's been in the news recently,” he wrote.
This photo of an Eagle taking a hard look at itself is not a metaphor for anything that's been in the news recently pic.twitter.com/FLyANNUg44
— Sam Morris (@SamMorrisDesign) January 26, 2017
At the time of this writing, the image has been retweeted 62,000 times.
And it prompted one of my colleagues at The Atlantic to ask: “Are eagles intelligent enough to recognize their own reflections?”
Well.
In March 1838, a young and little-known biologist named Charles Darwin asked the same question. On a visit to London Zoo, he stepped into a cage , and marveled as she played with a mirror. He noted that she was “astonished beyond measure” at the glass. She examined it, kissed it, made faces
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