The Genius of Birds

by Jennifer Ackerman

songbirds learn their songs the way we learn languages and pass these tunes along in rich cultural traditions that began tens of millions of years ago, when our primate ancestors were still scuttling about on all fours.

So reliable are the chickadee’s vocalizations that other species heed their warnings.

Or John Marzluff, who describes walking across the campus of the University of Washington and being singled out from thousands of other people by American crows that recognize him as a dangerous person who has trapped and banded them. The disgruntled crows still remember him years later and harass and scold him whenever they spot him.

Blue jays can select fertile acorns with 88 percent accuracy. They can also count to at least five. And they can neatly mimic the piercing cry of a red-shouldered hawk, kee-ah, kee-ah—which they do often, perhaps to fool other birds into believing there’s a raptor in the vicinity, leaving more nuts for the taking.

In one experiment, teams of people wandered through several Seattle neighborhoods, including the University of Washington campus, wearing different sorts of masks. One type of mask in each group of people represented the “dangerous” mask (on campus, it was a caveman mask). The people wearing the dangerous mask captured several wild crows. The other people, sporting “neutral” masks or no masks at all, just meandered along harmlessly. Nine years later, the masked scientists returned to the scene of the crime. The crows in these neighborhoods—including those that weren’t even hatched at the time of the capture—reacted to the people with the dangerous masks as if they were a threat, dive-bombing, scolding, and mobbing them.

If you happened to find yourself at the foot of the stairs in the White House on a typical afternoon sometime around 1804 or 1805, you might have noticed a perky bird in a pearl-gray coat ascending the steps behind Thomas Jefferson, hop by hop, as the president retired to his chambers for a siesta. This was Dick. Although the president didn’t dignify his pet mockingbird with one of the fancy Celtic or Gallic names he gave his horses and sheepdogs—Cucullin, Fingal, Bergère—still it was a favorite pet. “I sincerely congratulate you on the arrival of the Mocking bird,” Jefferson wrote to his son-in-law, who had informed him of the advent of the first resident mockingbird. “Learn all the children to venerate it as a superior being in the form of a bird.” Dick may well have been one of the two mockingbirds Jefferson bought in 1803. These were pricier than most pet birds ($10 or $15 then—around $125 now) because their serenades included not only renditions of all the birds of the local woods, but also popular American, Scottish, and French songs. Not everyone would pick this bird for a friend. Wordsworth called him the “merry mockingbird.” Brash, yes. Saucy and animated. But merry? His most common call is a bruising tschak!—a kind of unlovely avian expletive that one naturalist described as a cross between a snort of disgust and a hawking of phlegm. But Jefferson adored Dick for his uncommon intelligence, his musicality, and his remarkable ability to mimic. As the president’s fr...

Tolman proposed that humans, too, build such cognitive maps, and bravely suggested that these maps help us navigate not only space but the social and emotional relationships in “that great God-given maze that is our human world.” A narrow-minded map can lead one to devalue others and in the end to “desperately dangerous hates of outsiders” ranging in expression “from discrimination against minorities to world conflagrations,” Tolman wrote. The solution? Create broader cognitive maps in the mind that encompass bigger geographical boundaries and a wider social scope, embracing those we might consider “other,” and in this way encourage empathy and understanding.

This raises a troubling question. If our human navigational efforts shape our hippocampus, what happens when we stop using it for this purpose—when we lean too hard on technology such as GPS, which makes navigation a brain-free endeavor? GPS replaces navigational demands with a very pure form of stimulus-response behavior (turn left, turn right). Some scientists fear that overdependence on this technology will shrink our hippocampus. Indeed, when researchers at McGill University scanned the brains of older adults who used GPS and those who didn’t, they found that the people accustomed to navigating on their own had more gray matter in the hippocampus and showed less overall cognitive impairment than those who relied on GPS. As we lose the habit of forming cognitive maps, we may be losing gray matter (and along with it, if Tolman is right, our capacity for social understanding).