The Genius of Birds

by Jennifer Ackerman

Finally, in 2004 and 2005 came a manifesto rescuing the anatomical reputation of the bird brain. An international group of twenty-nine experts in neuroanatomy, led by two neurobiologists, Erich Jarvis of Duke University and Anton Reiner of the University of Tennessee, issued a series of papers overhauling Edinger’s misguided views and antiquated alphabet soup of brain misnomers. (It was not an easy task. One participant described the challenge of seeking consensus among the bird brain experts as an exercise in herding cats.) The members of the Avian Brain Nomenclature Consortium not only renamed the parts of the bird brain in light of modern understanding; they also related its structures to parallel structures in the mammalian brain so that bird biologists could talk to mammal biologists about what, in fact, were very similar brain regions in their respective subjects.