The Genius of Birds

by Jennifer Ackerman

In these kinds of lab tests, all sorts of variables may affect a bird’s failure or success. The boldness or fear of an individual bird may affect its problem-solving performance. Birds that are faster at solving tasks may not be smarter; they may just be less hesitant to engage in a new task. So a test designed to measure cognitive ability may really be measuring fearlessness. Is the grassquit just a shier bird? “Unfortunately it is extremely difficult to get a ‘pure’ measure of cognitive performance that is not affected by myriad other factors,” says Neeltje Boogert, a former student of Lefebvre, now a bird cognition researcher at the University of St Andrews. “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. A raging debate is ongoing in the field of behavioral ecology on how we should go about testing animal cognition; thus far no clear solutions have emerged.”