The Genius of Birds

by Jennifer Ackerman

Louis Halle

Chickadees are also possessed of a prodigious memory. They stash seeds and other food in thousands of different hiding places to eat later and can remember where they put a single food item for up to six months. All of this with a brain roughly twice the size of a garden pea.

A frigate bird with a seven-foot wingspan has a skeleton that weighs less than its feathers.

The 80 percent of bird species that are altricial, such as chickadees, tits, crows, ravens, and jays, among others, may be born small brained and helpless, but their brains—like ours—grow a great deal after birth, in part thanks to the nurturing of their parents. In other words, nest sitters end up with bigger brains than nest quitters.

BRAIN SIZE is also correlated with how long a bird stays in its nest to apprentice with its parents after fledging; the longer the juvenile period, the bigger the brain, perhaps so that a bird can store all it learns. Most intelligent animal species have long childhoods.

The crows travel with their tools, suggesting they value them; they know a good tool when they see one and keep it for reuse. There’s something almost outlandish about this behavior. Birds making a tool so good they want to reuse it? Plenty of animals use tools. But few make such elaborate ones. In fact, as far as we know, only four groups of animals on the planet craft their own complex tools: humans, chimps, orangutans, and New Caledonian crows. And even fewer make tools they keep and reuse.

savoir faire

(Parus major),

Even chickens form complex social relationships. Within a few days of socializing, chickens establish a stable social group with a clear hierarchy. 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.

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. In 2015, a story surfaced in Seattle of an eight-year-old girl, Gabi Mann, who started feeding crows on her way to and from the bus stop when she was only four. Later she began offering the crows peanuts on a tray in her yard as part of a daily ritual, and from time to time, after the peanuts had been consumed,

ask Bernd Heinrich, who has tried to conceal his identity from the ravens he works with by changing clothing; wearing kimonos, wigs, and sunglasses; and hopping or limping to shift his gait. (The birds weren’t fooled.) 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

Pinyon jays

spice finch,

cornflower-blue

Great War.

(I was interested to learn that roughly a third of the world’s languages describe the space occupied by one’s body not in terms of right and left but with cardinal directions. Those who speak such languages are more skilled at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar places.)

Leon Megginson,