Time Warped by Claudia Hammond Read Free Book Online Page B

long enough to travel 1,000 feet when you’re falling. He now thinks that five seconds is a long time. His experience is a good illustration of the way we each create a sense of time in our minds. To understand how we do it, it is necessary to look at the way the brain counts time.



 
    THE ALARM WENT off at 5.00 a.m. It was the wet season in Costa Rica, and we had got used to downpours in which it seemed as though huge vats of water were being tipped from the sky. This morning though was calm and dry: ideal for a bird-watching expedition.
    Ricky arrived exactly on time and spent some minutes carefully making a piratical skull cap out of his blue bandana. Once that was in place he topped it with a brown cap with the peak facing backwards. This headgear was decorated with an arrangement of twigs, leaves and bird feathers. Greying dreadlocks spilled out from under his hat and his weathered features were grizzled with a straggly, gorse-like beard. Our guide was a winning combination: Rastaman meets British naturalist David Bellamy.
    Ricky, like many Costa Ricans, is a mixture of ethnicities. In his case part Afro-Caribbean and part Bribri, one of the indigenous groups of the country. As a boy he followed his friends in trapping birds and keeping them in cages. But unlike his friends he was never cruel. His grandmothertaught him to care for the birds – to admire them and then release them. As an adult he became a naturalist, and now he takes people from all over the world to see birds on Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast.
    It was grey dawn and the sun couldn’t break through the cloud cover. This made the colours of the birds hard to see, but the Samasati valley was full of their sounds. Soon we heard the grating call of toucans and saw two flying overhead. When they landed at the top of a tall tree in the distance, one glimpse through the binoculars made it easy to see why so many tour agencies choose toucans for their logo. These were keel-billed toucans with green, red and yellow striped beaks with a streak of lime green across the top. In another tree we spotted a black-cheeked woodpecker that mimicked the exact movement of a toy I had on a spring on the end of my pencil at junior school.
    And it wasn’t just birds that we saw. A bulky grey blob wedged in the fork of a tall, leafless tree turned out to be a female two-toed sloth. Sleeping, of course. Ricky told us that she would stay up there for days, venturing down only for her weekly defecation. Sloths are rather fastidious about their toilet, burying their deposits in the way cats do. This devotion to hygiene comes at a price, however, as many end up being killed by dogs while going about their ground-level business.
    The morning was beginning to heat up and take on the familiar sticky humidity. We were tiring slightly. Then Ricky saw it. This was the bird we’d come to see, a bird with some most unusual skills – the rufous-tailed hummingbird. It was so small that it could almost have been a flying insect.Weighing less than a large paperclip it hovered in mid-air, dipping its curved red beak into the flower heads, its wings whirring in a figure of eight too fast for the human eye to see. What we could see was its emerald green head and the famous rust-coloured tail.
    Hummingbirds, or ‘hummers’ as their biggest fans like to call them, are the only birds in the world that can fly backwards. Quite a trick. But what is also fascinating about the hummingbird is its ability to judge the passage of time. Just as humans can guess when 20 minutes have passed, so can hummingbirds.
    They visit a plant, hover there, wings ablur, while they dip their stick-thin bills and elongated tongues into the long flower tubes and suck out the nectar. Having had their fill, they move on. The rufous-tailed hummingbird protects its source of food by aggressively seeing off any other birds that enter its territory, but it has a second technique of ensuring it gets to the nectar before