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.

Some birds are born Euclideans, capable of using geometric clues and landmarks to orient themselves in three-dimensional space, navigate through unknown territory, and locate hidden treasures.

Others are born accountants. In 2015 researchers found that newborn chicks spatially “map” numbers from left to right, as most humans do (left means less; right means more). This suggests that birds share with us a left-to-right orientation system—a cognitive strategy that underlies our human capacity for higher mathematics.

Bird brains may be little, but it’s plain they punch well above their weight.

Now there are some 10,400 different bird species—more than double the number of mammal species:

when scientists estimated the total number of wild birds on the planet, they came up with 200 to 400 billion individual birds. That’s roughly 30 to 60 live birds per person. To say that humans are more successful or advanced really depends on how you define those terms.

Like Lefebvre, most scientists who study birds prefer the term cognition to intelligence. 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.

There’s a parallel discussion in human intelligence. Most psychologists and neuroscientists agree that there are different kinds of human intelligence—emotional, analytic, spatial, creative, practical, to name a few. But they still debate about whether the types are independent or correlated.

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.

If one of the species you’re using in your experiment fails every test you give it, the problem may be you, the researcher, not the animal. You may have failed to understand what is relevant to the way a bird sees the world.”

“Birds, just like humans, will differ in how motivated they are to solve a cognitive test, how stressed they are about the test situation, how distracted they are by their surroundings, and how much experience they have had with similar tests.

One of Lefebvre’s favorites was the report of vultures in Zimbabwe that perched on barbed-wire fences near minefields during the war of liberation, waiting for gazelles and other grazers to wander in and detonate the explosives. It gave the birds a ready-made meal already pulverized. However, says Lefebvre, “occasionally a vulture got caught at its own game and was exploded by a mine.”

“Honestly, initially I didn’t think it would work,” he says. Anecdotes are considered unscientific; they’re “weak data,” in the lingo. “If one anecdote is unscientific, how can two thousand anecdotes become science? But I accepted the data at face value.

“It’s not just about size—at least not in all animals,” says Lefebvre. “When we’re measuring brain volume, are we measuring information- processing capacity?” asks Lefebvre. “Probably not.”

We are not born with all the brain cells we will ever have, as scientists long believed. In the hippocampus of humans, too, new brain cells are born and others die.

To Herculano-Houzel, this suggests that what determines cognitive abilities is not the number of neurons in the whole brain but in the cerebral cortex—or its equivalent in birds.

In short, finding large numbers of neurons in the cortexlike structures of parrots and songbirds, especially corvids, suggests a “large computational capacity,” say the scientists—which in turn may explain the behavioral and cognitive complexity reported for these bird families.

We are a naming species, and what we call things influences the way we think about them and the experiments we deem worthy of doing.

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.

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.

The jay then flew into a nearby tree and vigorously worked with its bill to break off a twig from a dead branch. It succeeded and, taking the blunt end in its beak with the sharp end pointing outward, flew back down to the platform. Brandishing the twig like a lance or spear, it lunged at the crow, missing its body by an inch. When the crow lunged back, the jay dropped the twig. The crow picked it up, pointed end outward, and stabbed back at the jay. The jay flew off, with the crow in hot pursuit, twig still in bill.

We “rub and polish our brains by contact with those of others.” —MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

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.

It should be noted here that birds do have personalities.