The Genius of Birds

by Jennifer Ackerman

There’s a kind of bird that creates colorful designs out of berries, bits of glass, and blossoms to attract females, and another kind that hides up to thirty-three thousand seeds scattered over dozens of square miles and remembers where it put them months later. There’s a species that solves a classic puzzle at nearly the same pace as a five-year-old child, and one that’s an expert at picking locks. There are birds that can count and do simple math, make their own tools, move to the beat of music, comprehend basic principles of physics, remember the past, and plan for the future.

brains of birds are lateralized; they have “sides” that process different kinds of information.

episodic memory, suggests to some scientists the possibility that these jays may be able to travel back into the past in their own minds—a key component of the kind of mental time travel once vaunted as uniquely human.

Birds are dinosaurs, descended from the lucky, flexible few that survived whatever cataclysm did in their cousins.

BIRDS LEARN. They solve new problems and invent novel solutions to old ones. They make and use tools. They count. They copy behaviors from one another. They remember where they put things.

but certain species seem to understand cause and effect—one of the building blocks of insight.

Nature is a master of bricolage, hanging on to biological bits that are useful and modifying them for new purposes.

We also share with birds similar ways of meeting nature’s challenges, which we’ve arrived at through very different evolutionary paths. It’s called convergent evolution, and it’s rampant in the natural world.

The circuits in the bird brain that control social behavior are much like the circuits in our own brains, it turns out, run by similar genes and chemicals.

If we can understand why two animals so distantly related converged on the same pattern of brain activity during sleep, we might solve one of nature’s great mysteries—the purpose of sleep.