The Genius of Birds

by Jennifer Ackerman

INTELLIGENCE IS a slippery concept, even in our own species, tricky to define and tricky to measure. One psychologist describes it as “the capacity to learn or to profit by experience.” And another, as “the capacity to acquire capacity”—the same sort of circular definition offered up by Harvard psychologist Edwin Boring: “Intelligence is what is measured by intelligence tests.” As Robert Sternberg, a former dean at Tufts University, once quipped, “There seem to be almost as many definitions of intelligence as . . . experts asked to define it.”

his theory of “multiple intelligences,” Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner identifies eight different types of intelligence and suggests

that they’re independent. They are bodily, linguistic, musical, mathematical or logical, naturalistic (sensitivity to the natural world), spatial (knowing where you are relative to a fixed location), interpersonal (sensing and being in tune with others), and intrapersonal (understanding and controlling one’s own emotions and thoughts)—a list with intriguing parallels in the bird world: Think of a hummingbird’s acrobatic use of its own body or a plain-tailed wren’s astonishing talent for musical duets or a pigeon’s gift for knowing where it needs to go.