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This ability to remember the what, where, and when of an event, called 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.
biological terms, they have a very big ecological niche. As a class, birds have been around for more than 100 million years.
Same as flowering plants, coincidence?
chachalacas.
Good band name
Perhaps it’s because they’re so unlike people that it’s difficult for us to fully appreciate their mental capabilities.
these are all human yardsticks of intelligence. We can’t help but measure other minds against our own. But birds also possess ways of knowing beyond our ken, which we can’t easily dismiss as merely instinctual or hardwired.
As evolutionary biologist John Endler points out, “Again and again, in totally unrelated groups, we find many instances of convergence in form, appearance, anatomy, behavior and other aspects. So why not in cognition, too?”
A group of two hundred scientists from eighty different labs recently offered a window on these parallels when they sequenced the genomes of forty-eight birds. Their results, published in 2014, revealed startlingly similar gene activity in the brains of humans learning to speak and birds learning to sing,
Is it FOXP2 the gene involved in sequential processing?
Louis Lefebvre invented the first scale of intelligence for birds. A biologist and comparative psychologist at McGill University,
in The Descent of Man, Darwin argued that animals and humans differ in their mental powers only in degree, not in kind.
what primatologist Frans de Waal calls “anthropodenial,” blindness to the humanlike characteristics of other species. “Those who are in anthropodenial,” says de Waal, “try to build a brick wall to separate humans from the rest of the animal kingdom.”
They ask birds to open food containers by pushing levers, pulling strings, swinging caps aside. They measure how long it takes and how readily birds change tactics in attempting to solve the problem.
It’s tricky, however.
variables may affect a bird’s failure or success. The boldness or fear of an individual bird may affect its problem-solving performance.
“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.
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.”
Lefebvre wondered, “Why was the kingbird the one bird taking advantage of this splendid new food source?”
Valuing innovation as a signature of intelligence
It’s a notion that was proposed three decades ago by Jane Goodall and her colleague Hans Kummer. The pair made a plea for measuring a wild animal’s intelligence by looking at its ability to find solutions to problems in its natural setting.
collecting these sorts of anecdotal notes from ornithological journals might provide just the sort of ecological evidence Kummer and Goodall called for.
Ethnology cum memoir thru crowd sourcing
Lefebvre scoured seventy-five years’ worth of bird journals for reports featuring key words like “unusual,” “novel,” or “first-reported instance,” and came up with more than twenty-three hundred examples from hundreds of different species.
“Honestly, initially I didn’t think it would work,” he says. Anecdotes are considered unscientific; they’re “weak data,” in the lingo.
you have to know how they behave in the wild,” he says. “Then you try to get inside their heads.
Lately, the high, thin whistles and complex gargle calls of chickadees—the fee-bees, zeees, dee-dee-dees, and sibilant stheeps—have been parsed by scientists and declared one of the most sophisticated and exacting systems of communication of any land animal.
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.
Their small size, evolutionary flexibility, and certain novel adaptations (efficient insulation from highly developed feathers and the ability to fly and forage over long distances) may have helped birds survive the catastrophic events that killed off many of their dinosaurian cousins—and then go on to become one of the most successful groups of land vertebrates on the planet.
How does a creature hold on to a big brain while the rest of its body shrinks? Birds managed the trick the same way we did: by keeping a babyish head and face. It’s an evolutionary process called paedomorphosis
Neotony
“When we look at birds,” says Abzhanov, “we are looking at juvenile dinosaurs.”
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.
That both humans and birds show this kind of localized brain effect suggests that slow-wave sleep may play a role in maintaining optimal brain functioning,
The point, says Erich Jarvis, is that there is more than one way to generate complex behaviors: “There’s the mammal way. And there’s the bird way.”
Clearly working memory can exist without a layered cerebral cortex. In humans and birds, it “differ[s] only with respect to the presence of a language component in humans,” says Onur Güntürkün, a neuroscientist at the Ruhr University Bochum in Germany. “The neural processes generating working memory seem to be identical in both.”
the wild, these crows make elaborate tools from sticks, leaf edges, and other materials, which they use to winkle grubs and insects from burrows in fallen wood, from behind bark or leaves, and from the base of leaves, crevices, holes, and cavities of all kinds. The crows travel with their tools, suggesting they value them; they know a good tool when they see one and keep it for reuse.
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.
Some birds use objects as weapons. One American crow in Stillwater, Oklahoma, lobbed three pinecones at a scientist’s head as he climbed up to its nest. A pair of ravens in Oregon defending their nestlings from two intruding researchers used similar tactics but harder weaponry. “A rock the size of a golf ball fell past my face and landed next to my feet,”
the complete shape and design of a pandanus stepped tool is determined before it’s made. The bird crafts the whole thing while it’s still on the leaf. It works as a tool only after the crow makes a final cut to separate it from the leaf. This suggests to some scientists that the bird may be working from some form of mental template.
In this respect, New Caledonian crows may offer clues to understanding our own human strategies of life. We humans stand out in our primate tribe for the extended period of juvenile dependence we enjoy and our learning-intensive survival strategies. According to the Auckland team, the link between a high level of technological skill in foraging and a long juvenile period of provisioning by parents in both humans and New Caledonian crows suggests that the two traits may be causally related. It’s called the early learning hypothesis. Perhaps possessing learning-intensive tool skills plays a role
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Not long ago, this kind of social savoir faire was presumed far beyond a bird’s reach. The idea, for instance, that birds could think about what other birds might be thinking was considered preposterous. Lately, the view has shifted, with science suggesting that some bird species have social lives nearly as complex as our own, which require some very sophisticated mental skills indeed.
great tits in Wytham Woods, a stretch of well-studied old woodlands to the west of Oxford.
blue terriers,” as Emily Dickinson said. Blue jays
Bluejay is the trickster hero of the Chinook and other Northwest Coast tribes.
birds may possess a key component of what’s known as theory of mind,
“Attributing desires to others is cognitively less demanding than attributing beliefs,” says Ostojić. “For humans this is an early step toward the development of a full theory of mind. If the male jay really understands what the female wants, this would provide evidence that a nonhuman animal is capable of this important aspect of theory of mind.”
Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney, lodge in the latter camp. They argue that even the most complex human forms of theory of mind have their roots in what they call a subconscious appreciation of others’ intentions and perspectives.
So dangerous is it for a babbler to have its head down that the birds take turns acting as sentinels, forgoing their own foraging to keep a lookout on behalf of the group for trouble arriving by land or by sky. The sentinel perches in an open spot above the foragers and actively scans for predators,
Like quail
Plain-tailed wrens, shy, drab little birds living deep in the cloud forests of the Andes, sing rapidly alternating syllables so perfectly coordinated that it sounds like a single bird singing alone.
According to Goodson, the circuits in the brains of birds that control social behavior are much like the circuits in our own brains. The circuits are old—so old they are common to all vertebrates, dating back something like 450 million years, to the common ancestor of birds, mammals, and sharks.
In our brains, the nonapeptides are known as oxytocin and vasopressin.
Johan Bolhuis, a neurobiologist at Utrecht University, remarks on how strange it must seem to an outsider for scientists to be comparing birdsong with human speech and language. “If we were looking for some kind of animal equivalent, wouldn’t we look to our closest relatives, the great apes?” he asks. “But the odd thing is, so many aspects of human speech acquisition are similar to the way that songbirds acquire their songs. In the great apes, there’s no equivalent at all.”
And indeed, that afternoon in Georgetown, Jarvis announces that a massive international effort to sequence the genomes of forty-eight species of birds has identified a set of more than fifty genes that flick on and off in the brains of both humans and songbirds in regions involved in imitating sounds, speaking, and singing. This difference in activity doesn’t occur in birds that aren’t vocal learners (such as doves and quail) or in primates that don’t speak.
Jarvis has a theory. In one recent imaging study conducted by his lab, he noticed that when birds hop, genes become active in seven brain areas that directly surround the seven song-learning regions of the brain. The brain areas involved in singing and learning to sing seem to be embedded in brain areas controlling movement. This suggests to Jarvis an intriguing notion, what he calls “a motor theory for the origin of vocal learning”: Brain pathways used for vocal learning may have evolved out of those used for motor control.
Sequential activity, FOXP2
