The Genius of Birds

by Jennifer Ackerman

Keas may be the titans of tomfoolery, but corvids frolic, too. Ravens play toss with themselves, throwing twigs up in the air and catching them.

Carrion crows were caught on camera in Japan skidding down a children’s slide. Not long ago, a video from Russia of a crow snowboarding down a roof with a jar lid went viral.

only parrots stacked rings onto tubes and poles, the Goffin’s more than any other, neatly coordinating their beak with one foot to accomplish the task. These Indonesian birds are known for their outstanding problem-solving skills and for using tools creatively in captivity.

(So rich a food source are grubs that the kaka, a New Zealand parrot, will spend more than eighty minutes extracting a single grub with its long bill.)

Many bird species are highly social. They breed in colonies, bathe in groups, roost in congregations, forage in flocks. They eavesdrop. They argue. They cheat. They deceive and manipulate. They kidnap. They divorce. They display a strong sense of fairness. They give gifts. They play keep-away and tug-of-war with twigs, strands of Spanish moss, bits of gauze. They pilfer from their neighbors. They warn their young away from strangers. They tease. They share. They cultivate social networks. They vie for status. They kiss to console one another. They teach their young. They blackmail their parents. They summon witnesses to the death of a peer. They may even grieve. Not long ago, this kind of social savoir faire was presumed far beyond a bird’s reach. The idea, for instance, that birds could think about what other birds might be thinking was considered preposterous. Lately, the view has shifted, with science suggesting that some bird species have social lives nearly as complex as our own, which require some very sophisticated mental skills indeed.

Great tits (Parus major), the colorful little yellow-breasted birds

Absolutely zero double-entendre intended there! :-p

the tits, an “association matrix”

The tits, it turns out, have a complicated social network in which birds gather in loose foraging flocks based on their personalities.

In fact, we owe the expression “pecking order” to studies of the social relations among chickens by the Norwegian zoologist Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe, who found that pecking orders are ladderlike, with the top rung conferring great privilege in the form of food and safety, and the bottom rung fraught with vulnerability and risk.

the sticky social ones, the trials and tribulations of getting along? It’s called the social intelligence hypothesis, and among scientists, it has lately won a considerable following.

Magpies recognize their own image in a mirror, a form of self-awareness that we once believed was restricted to humans and a handful of other sophisticated social mammals.

Cue Heckel & Jeckel…

They also understand the benefits of reciprocity and sharing and will opt for a food reward that will be shared with a human rather than one enjoyed solo, as long as they know their human friend will also reciprocate.

Reciprocity in the form of gift giving is another kind of social behavior unusual in nonhumans but fairly common among certain birds, including crows.

was skeptical. But in recent years, tales have rolled in from all over the country of crows offering up gifts of jewelry, hardware, shards of glass, a Santa figurine, a foam dart from a toy gun, a Donald Duck Pez dispenser, even a candy heart with “love” printed on it, delivered just after Valentine’s Day.

“Leaving gifts suggests that crows understand the benefit of reciprocating past acts that have benefited them and also that they anticipate future reward,”

Crows and ravens will balk at doing work for less reward than a peer is getting. This sensitivity to inequity had previously been thought to exist only in primates and dogs and is considered a crucial cognitive tool in the evolution of human cooperation.

I read elsewhere that dogs could sense fairness but *not* equity. Hmmm.

Corvids and cockatoos can delay gratification if they think a reward is worth waiting for—a form of emotional intelligence involving self-control, persistence, and the ability to motivate oneself.

Alice Auersperg and her team at the University of Vienna found that Goffin’s cockatoos offered a pecan would wait up to 80 seconds for a more delicious treat of a cashew.

Deciding to delay gratification requires not only self-control but also the capacity to assess a respective gain in the quality of a reward relative to the cost of waiting for it—not to mention the reliability of the individual doling out the rewards. These kinds of abilities, thought to be the precursors of economic decision making, are rare in nonhumans.

But Bugnyar found that ravens remember their valued friends even after a separation of as long as three years.

It’s worth noting that corvids recognize and recall not only fellow corvids but humans, too. They can pick out familiar human faces from a crowd, particularly those that represent a threat—and

disgruntled crows still remember him years later and harass and scold him whenever they spot him. In a brain-imaging study on the crows, Marzluff recently discovered that the birds recognize human faces using the same visual and neural pathways that we do.

“like blue terriers,” as Emily Dickinson said. Blue jays can select fertile acorns with 88 percent accuracy. They can also count to at least five.

Like many other corvids, Eurasian jays share food, but they do so only to win the favor of their mates. A male courts a mate by selecting tasty gifts for her.

True romance!

In an elegant experiment, male jays were allowed to watch through a screen while their mates ate their fill of one of two special treats, wax worms or mealworms. (These goodies might not sound tasty to you, but wax worms are the “dark chocolate” of the jay world.)

worm or mealworm. Birds, like people, favor variety and can fill up on too much of a good thing. It’s called the specific satiety effect. (You know the feeling. You’ve been gorging on cheese—couldn’t eat another piece—so you switch to fruit.)

When there is no opportunity to feed his mate, he chooses between the two foods according to his own preferences. When he can share with her, he disengages from his personal desires and anticipates hers, as if he’s cognizant of her specific satiety.

To quote one of the Air Force Core Values, “Cervix,” er, “Service Before Self.”

that birds may possess a key component of what’s known as theory of mind, the understanding that others have beliefs, desires, and perspectives that are different from one’s own.

It should be noted here that birds do have personalities.

Scientists recently identified such personality differences in the chickadee,

Think back to those famous British tits that learned how to open milk bottles in the early twentieth century, a trick one bird learned from the next until, by the 1950s, milk bottles all over England were under siege.

Gor’blimey!

Female zebra finches learn about mate choice from other females. Say a virgin female sees another female mating with a male wearing a white leg band. Later, when she is presented with two banded but unfamiliar males, one wearing a white band, the other an orange one, she will pick the guy in white.

She wants a guy with proven experience, eh. ;-)

But growing evidence suggests that some nonhuman animals do in fact show forms of teaching.

Even ants apparently teach. Scientists have observed experienced tandem-running ants modifying their journeys when trailed by a naïve follower, pausing en route to let a follower-pupil explore landmarks and resuming the journey only when the follower taps them with an antenna.

the apparent pedagogy of the pied babbler is so intriguing.

THE SOUTHERN PIED BABBLER (Turdoides bicolor) is a striking white bird with dark chocolate flight and tail feathers that thrives in the...

Known in Afrikaans as the “white cat-laughers,”

Babblers are cooperative breeders. Family groups are dominated by a single breeding pair, along with several other adults that don’t get to breed, but that nevertheless help to feed and care for the young. The dominant pair is monogamous not only socially but sexually, too—a rare thing in the bird world.

Ridley and her colleague Nichola Raihani have found that a few days before young babblers fledge, adults begin to emit a soft “purr” call when they bring food to the nest, accompanied by a gentle wing flutter. This is the training period: Purr call means food. The adults start to use the call only as the young approach fledgling age.

Fledglings, for their part, are not passive pupils. The studies by Ridley and her colleagues suggest that the young birds use at least two clever social strategies to boost the amount of food they get. First, they’re picky about whom they follow, choosing to tag along with adults who are especially proficient at capturing prey. Second, when they’re hungry, they “blackmail” adults into feeding them at higher rates by venturing into riskier open locations. When they’re satiated, they stay in the cover and relative safety of trees.

SCIENTISTS HAVE FOUND this sort of surprising social ingenuity in the lives of many bird species. What they haven’t found is something they expected: a correlation between a bird’s social group size and its brain size.

For birds, it seems, the quality of relationships, not the quantity, calls for additional brainpower.

About 80 percent of bird species live in socially monogamous pairs, that is, they stay with the same partner for a single breeding season or longer. (That’s in stark contrast to the roughly 3 percent of mammal species that exhibit this sort of social monogamy.)

According to cognitive biologist Nathan Emery, being bound up with one partner in this way requires a special form of cognition. Called relationship intelligence, it’s the ability to read a partner’s subtle social signals, respond appropriately, and use this information to predict his or her behavior. And it takes considerable mental acumen.

A male budgerigar (Melopsittacus undulatus)

AKA the “budgie?”

In our brains, the nonapeptides are known as oxytocin and vasopressin. Oxytocin, which is made in the hypothalamus of the brain, has been dubbed the love chemical; the cuddle, or trust, hormone; and even the moral molecule. In mammals, it plays a key role in giving birth, lactating, and maternal bonding.

New research shows that food sharing in chimps raises oxytocin levels more than grooming does. This is evidence, perhaps, for the truth of the maxim “The way to your lover’s heart is through her stomach” (and perhaps a window on the Eurasian jay’s attention to his mate’s appetites). In humans, oxytocin has been shown to reduce anxiety and promote trust, empathy, and sensitivity.

Birds have their own versions of these neurohormones, called mesotocin and vasotocin.

one that was “moderately” social—the Angolan blue waxbill.

and the spice finch, a handsome chestnut bird from tropical Asia that prefers the company of thousands (and known in one lab as the “hippie,” or “pacifist,” of finches because it has not been observed to show aggression of any kind).

Kumbaya.