The Genius of Birds

by Jennifer Ackerman

For a long time, the knock on birds was that they’re stupid. Beady eyed and nut brained. Reptiles with wings. Pigeon heads. Turkeys. They fly into windows, peck at their reflections, buzz into power lines, blunder into extinction. Our language reflects our disrespect. Something worthless or unappealing is “for the birds.” An ineffectual politician is a “lame duck.” To “lay an egg” is to flub a performance. To be “henpecked” is to be harassed with persistent nagging. “Eating crow” is eating humble pie. The expression “bird brain,” for a stupid, foolish, or scatterbrained person, entered the English language in the early 1920s because people thought of birds as mere flying, pecking automatons, with brains so small they had no capacity for thought at all. That view is a gone goose.

examples of bird species capable of mental feats comparable to those found in primates.

(left means less; right means more).

In judging the overall intelligence of animals, scientists may look at how successful they are at surviving and reproducing in many different environments. By this measure, birds trump nearly all vertebrates, including fish, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals. They are the one form of wildlife visible nearly everywhere. They live in every part of the globe, from the equator to the poles, from the lowest deserts to the highest peaks, in virtually every habitat, on land, sea, and in bodies of freshwater. In biological terms, they have a very big ecological niche.

Birds are dinosaurs,

Both great tits

THE MISGUIDED USE OF “bird brain” as a slur has finally come home to roost.

a roadrunner sitting on a roof next to a hummingbird feeder and picking off the hummers; a great skua in the Antarctic snuggling in among newborn seal pups and sipping milk from their lactating mother; herons wolfing down a rabbit or a muskrat; a pelican in London swallowing a pigeon; a gull ingesting a blue jay; or a normally insectivorous yellowhead in New Zealand seen for the first time eating bush lily fruits.

Wow!!

Several observers noted instances of green herons using insects as bait, placing them delicately on the surface of the water to lure fish. A herring gull adapted its normal shell-dropping technique to nail a rabbit. Among the more inventive examples: bald eagles ice fishing in northern Arizona. The birds had discovered a cache of dead fathead minnows frozen under the surface of an ice-covered lake. They were seen chipping holes in the ice, then jumping up and down on the surface, using their body weight to push the minnows up through the holes. One of Lefebvre’s favorites was the report of vultures in Zimbabwe that perched on barbed-wire fences near minefields during the war of liberation, waiting for gazelles and other grazers to wander in and detonate the explosives. It gave the birds a ready-made meal already pulverized. However, says Lefebvre, “occasionally a vulture got caught at its own game and was exploded by a mine.”

Fascinating!

Corvids, no surprise—with ravens and crows as the clear outliers—along with parrots. Then came grackles, raptors (especially falcons and hawks), woodpeckers, hornbills, gulls, kingfishers, roadrunners, and herons. (Owls were excluded from the search because they are nocturnal and their innovations are rarely observed directly, but rather inferred from fecal evidence.) Also high on the totem pole were birds in the sparrow and tit families. Among those at the low end were quails, ostriches, bustards, turkeys, and nightjars.

Wow, kinda surprising about ostriches being at the low end of the scale. Beep-Beep the Roadrunner would be proud of his species’ ranking though. ;-)

When one asked him to name the world’s dumbest bird, Lefebvre answered, “That would be the emu.” The next day’s headlines read, CANADIAN RESEARCHER NAMES NATIONAL BIRD OF AUSTRALIA “WORLD’S MOST STUPID BIRD.”

Haha, cue the LiMu Emu TV adverts.

In fact, says paleontologist Stephen Brusatte of the University of Edinburgh, “we find that there is no clear distinction between ‘dinosaur’ and ‘bird’. A dinosaur didn’t just change into a bird one day; instead, the bird body plan began early and was assembled gradually, piece by piece, over 100 million years of steady evolution.”

!!

movements; in the pterodactyl-like wings of a rhinoceros hornbill;

great blue heron—the slow heavy wing beat, the snaky finesse of its neck, the hoarse squawks, are all a throwback to dinosaur lagoons.

Feathers were one of those signature features deemed the exclusive province of modern birds. The ancient Jehol beds changed all that.

Hence the recent “Reimagining Dinosaurs” issue of National Geographic magazine?

the Paraves (which included those Velociraptors of Jurassic Park fame), were testing out flight modes, gliding, parachuting, jumping between trees;

Their small size, evolutionary flexibility, and certain novel adaptations (efficient insulation from highly developed feathers and the ability to fly and forage over long distances) may have helped birds survive the catastrophic events that killed off many of their dinosaurian cousins—and then go on to become one of the most successful groups of land vertebrates on the planet.

bird brains came before birds, just as feathers did.

How does a creature hold on to a big brain while the rest of its body shrinks? Birds managed the trick the same way we did: by keeping a babyish head and face. It’s an evolutionary process called paedomorphosis (literally, “child formation”),

“When we look at birds,” says Abzhanov, “we are looking at juvenile dinosaurs.”

Reproductive strategy plays a role in brain size. The 20 percent of bird species that are precocial—born with their eyes open and able to leave the nest within a day or two—have larger brains at birth than altricial birds. The latter are born naked, blind, and helpless and remain in the nest until they’re as big as their parents, and only then fully fledge.

nest sitters end up with bigger brains than nest quitters.

Like half a million other voyeurs from 166 countries, I became a heron addict.

Haha, I see what you did there.

Where there is no drama, people create it. We can’t help ourselves. “#5 reminds me of the neighbor boy in Death of a Salesman. In act 1, he’s this nerdy little dweeb, and in act 2, he’s a successful attorney arguing cases before the Supreme Court.”

Ha!

MIGRATION IS ANOTHER TRADE-OFF. Birds that migrate have smaller brains than their sedentary relatives.

This anatomical dissing began in the late years of the nineteenth century, with the observations of Ludwig Edinger, a German neurobiologist known as the father of comparative anatomy. Edinger believed that evolution was linear and progressive.

Irene Pepperberg uses a computer analogy. Mammalian brains are like PCs, she says, while bird brains are like Apples. The processing is different, but the output is similar.

BIRDS HAVE FINALLY GAINED new respect. They may be relatively small brained, but they are certainly not small minded.

Better late than never!

Even in this shrewd company, New Caledonian crows stand out. While they may not make and use the variety of tools that chimps and orangutans do, they craft their tools with precision from a range of materials. They make them the proper length and diameter for any particular task. They modify them to solve new problems. They innovate. They use tools in sequence, as 007 did in the video of that eight-stage puzzle, using a short tool to get a longer one that can be used to get food. And perhaps most impressively, they make and use hook tools—the only species other than humans to do so.

New Caledonian crows, like rats and humans, are euryphagous, partial to a variety of plant and animal food. They will happily consume insects and their larvae, snails, lizards, carrion, fruit, nuts, and human leftovers littering a site.

Isn’t that one and the same as “omnivorous?”

Green herons are expert bait fishers, known to entice their prey with bread, popcorn, seeds, flowers, live insects, spiders, feathers, even pellets of fish food. Dung is the decoy of choice for the burrowing owl. The owls scatter clumps of animal feces near the mouth of their nest chambers and wait motionless like muggers for unsuspecting dung beetles to scuttle toward their trap.

Well, crap! And who sez it’s not easy being green? ;-)

and, perhaps most unusual, as a kind of bayonet in a scuffle over seed between a crow and a jay. This last example is the first documented case of a bird using an object as a weapon against another bird, so it’s worth pausing to explain.

“Fix...bayonets!!”

STILL, AS FAR AS WE KNOW, in terms of artful toolmaking and use in the wild, no bird matches the New Caledonian crow. A few years ago, Christian Rutz of the University of St Andrews and his team used motion-triggered video cameras to get detailed views

St. Andrew, patron saint of Scotland, och aye, laddie!

When it comes to the nuts and bolts of tool crafting, only chimps and orangutans match or exceed the New Caledonian crow’s sophistication. And not even these hotshot primates can make hook tools.

The signatures of cognition evident in the crows’ behavior might represent the in-between steps along the way to our own complex cognitive abilities such as imagining scenarios or reasoning about cause and effect. “That’s why we’re really interested in these crows as model species,” says Taylor. “Pinpointing the cognitive mechanisms they use can offer insights into the evolution of human thinking and of intelligence in general.”

(“People have the mistaken impression that science is all about thinking and experimenting,” Loissel quips, “when a lot of time is actually spent chopping tomatoes or cutting beef into tiny cubes.”)

Whether New Caledonian crows have leaps of insight remains to be determined, but these experiments suggest that these birds do have an extraordinary ability to notice the consequences of their own actions, says Taylor, and to pay attention to the way objects interact. These are mighty useful mental tools when it comes to making and using material tools.

if given a choice between heavy objects and light ones, solid and hollow ones, the crows will spontaneously pick objects that will sink over those that will float. They know how to pick their materials and will select the right option 90 percent of the time. This suggests that the crows understand water displacement, a fairly sophisticated physical concept, on par with the comprehension of a child five to seven years old. It also suggests that they’re able to grasp the basic physical properties of objects and make inferences about them.

Birds can undo the cleverest devices, taking the stuffing out of a scientist about as fast as anything you can imagine. But there are other moments—if one is paying attention—that may offer a rich reward.

Do birds play? Do they do things just for fun?

suggest that larger-brained, altricial species of birds (like many mammals) do play—although it “seems to be relatively uncommon in birds,” they write, “seen in only 1% of the approximately 10,000 species and largely restricted to species with an extended developmental period, such as crows and parrots.”

According to zoologist Millicent Ficken, it’s only clever birds that are capable of complex play activities. And through play, they make discoveries and experiment with the relationship between their own actions and the external world. In other words, play both requires intelligence and nurtures it.

Members of the parrot family tend to be an irrepressibly playful lot.

According to expert testimony, the kings of fowl play are keas. These crow-sized parrots live in the Southern Alps of New Zealand. They’re nicknamed “mountain monkeys” because of their cheeky nature and primatelike intelligence.

Two scientists, Judy Diamond and Alan Bond, who have studied the kea for many years, consider it possibly the smartest, most waggish bird in the world.

When it comes to playing with stuff, keas far outshine their corvid cousins. They are “bold, curious, and ingeniously destructive,” says Diamond, considered (depending on who you ask) either playful comics—“clowns of the mountains”—or destructive hoodlums that go around in juvenile gangs trashing things,

Keas also love to horseplay.

There are no winners or losers. (Everyone gets a trophy.)

Sometimes keas play the imp or practical jokester.

A few years ago, the New Zealand Sunday Morning Herald reported that a kea stole eleven hundred dollars from an unsuspecting Scottish tourist.

Och aye, laddie, bloody hell!