The Genius of Birds

by Jennifer Ackerman

IN THIS BOOK, genius is defined as the knack for knowing what you’re doing—for “catching on” to your surroundings, making sense of things, and figuring out how to solve your problems.

Animal cognition is generally defined as any mechanism by which an animal acquires, processes, stores, and uses information. It usually refers to the mechanisms involved in learning, memory, perception, and decision making. There are so-called higher and lower forms of cognition. For instance, insight, reasoning, and planning are considered high-level cognitive abilities. Lower-level cognitive skills include attention and motivation.

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.

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.

Birds that migrate have smaller brains than their sedentary relatives.

In general, animals facing unforgiving or unpredictable environments are thought to have enhanced cognitive abilities, including better problem-solving skills and an openness to exploring new things.

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.