The Genius of Birds

by Jennifer Ackerman

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

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, suggesting that there may be a kind of core pattern of gene expression for learning shared by birds and humans alike and arrived at through convergent evolution.

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.

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.

The condensed genomes of birds may also be an adaptation to powered flight. Birds have the smallest genomes of any amniote, the group of animals, including reptiles and mammals, that lay their eggs on land. A typical mammal has a genome ranging from 1 billion to 8 billion base pairs, whereas in birds, it hovers at around 1 billion, a result of fewer repeat elements and a large number of so-called deletion events, in which DNA has been expunged over evolutionary time. A more compressed genome may allow a bird to regulate its genes more rapidly to meet the requirements of flight.

“When we look at birds,” says Abzhanov, “we are looking at juvenile dinosaurs.”

In 2014, Brazilian neuroscientist Suzana Herculano-Houzel and her colleagues determined the numbers of neurons and other cells in the brains of eleven species of parrots and fourteen species of songbirds. The brains of birds may be small, says Herculano- Houzel, but they “pack surprisingly high numbers of neurons, really high, with densities at least akin to what we find in primates. And in corvids and parrots, the numbers are even higher.”

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.

the birds have been known to steal television antennae from houses and deflate automobile tires.

In 2015, a story surfaced in Seattle of an eight-year-old girl, Gabi Mann, who started feeding crows on her way to and from the bus stop when she was only four. Later she began offering the crows peanuts on a tray in her yard as part of a daily ritual, and from time to time, after the peanuts had been consumed, trinkets showed up on the tray: an earring, bolts and screws, hinges, buttons, a tiny white plastic tube, a rotting crab claw, a small scrap of metal printed with the word “best,” and Gabi’s favorite, an opalescent white heart.

Blue jays can select fertile acorns with 88 percent accuracy. They can also count to at least five. And they can neatly mimic the piercing cry of a red-shouldered hawk, kee-ah, kee-ah—which they do often, perhaps to fool other birds into believing there’s a raptor in the vicinity, leaving more nuts for the taking. No wonder Bluejay is the trickster hero of the Chinook and other Northwest Coast tribes.

Generally there are two camps: first, the self-described killjoys, who deny that nonhuman species have anything remotely resembling this kind of advanced cognition; and second, those who echo Darwin’s claim that humans differ mentally from other species only in degree but not in kind.

Many people assume that birdsongs are genetically encoded. But songbirds go through the same process of vocal learning that people do—they listen to adult exemplars, they experiment, and they practice, honing their skills like children learning a musical instrument.

Some of our most complicated skills—language, speech, music—we learn the way birds do, through a similar process of imitation.

Birds know where to sing and when. In the open, sound travels best a few feet or so above the vegetation, so birds sing from perches to reduce interference. Those singing on the forest floor use tonal sounds and lower frequencies than those singing in the canopy. Some use frequencies that avoid the noise from insects and traffic. Birds living near airports sing their dawn chorus earlier than normal to reduce overlap with the roar of airplanes.

Gifted songbirds such as the mockingbird and canary can vibrate each of their two membranes independently, producing two different, harmonically unrelated notes at the same time—a low-frequency sound on the left, a high-frequency sound on the right—and shifting the volume and frequency of each with such breathtaking speed as to produce some of the most acoustically complex and varied vocal sounds in nature. (This is quite extraordinary. When we talk, all of our pitch, all the harmonics of our vocalizations, move in the same direction.)

The lyrebird is renowned as a champion sound thief. As one naturalist noted, it’s a startling experience to be walking in the Australian forest when suddenly you’re confronted “by a fowl-like, brown bird which may bark at you like a dog.”

Not long ago, a naturalist working at the Australian Museum’s Search and Discover desk reportedly took a number of calls from people who had heard wild cockatoos swearing in the outback.

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. Many of the genes Jarvis found in that set of fifty that overlap between humans and birds are active in the same way: forming new links between neurons of the motor cortex and neurons that control the muscles that produce sound.

Male birds sitting at the top of the tree in broad daylight, visible to the hawks and other predators that might pick them off, are saying to the female (to put it in anthropomorphic terms), ‘Here I can sing boldly, loudly, and have all these different imitative sounds.’ They’re basically boasting: ‘Look how well I can sing. Look how well I can imitate. Choose me.’” The mockingbird’s Paganini performance with puffed-out chest is one big emphatic come-on, a “Hey, babe, check me out.”

A typical songbird nestling reaches about 90 percent of his adult weight within the first ten days of his life—an

The videos revealed that males vary a lot in their sensitivity to how a female responds to their display. Some males are attentive. If a female seems alarmed, they will rein in their display, tempering their wing flipping and giving her some distance. Other males are oblivious. The responsive dudes, it turned out, are those that secure the most matings. Males who go overboard in demonstrating their intensity and power lose out. In other words, says Patricelli, sexual selection seems to favor both the evolution of elaborate display traits and also the ability to use them appropriately. And this may be where our hero fell short. He lacked social grace.

Birds may be capable of sensing quantum effects.

A ruby-throated hummingbird weighs about 3 grams, less than an old penny.

In our brains, the hippocampus is a seahorse-shaped structure buried deep within the medial temporal lobe. A bird’s hippocampus sits on top of the brain like a button or a little toadstool. But in both bird and boy, this whiff of tissue harbors our mental maps—and our memories. In fact, our recollections appear to be all bound up with where we experienced an event.

Your memory of a thought is married to the place in which it first occurred to you.

Hummingbirds can really crow in this respect. Relative to their whole brain size, they have a bigger hippocampus than any other bird, two to five times larger than that of caching and noncaching songbirds, seabirds, and woodpeckers.

IN ANY CASE, the size of a pigeon’s hippocampus may reflect experience and how often its navigational skills are called up. In other words, it may be shaped by use. British researchers discovered that this appears to be true for humans, too,

This raises a troubling question. If our human navigational efforts shape our hippocampus, what happens when we stop using it for this purpose—when we lean too hard on technology such as GPS, which makes navigation a brain-free endeavor? GPS replaces navigational demands with a very pure form of stimulus-response behavior (turn left, turn right). Some scientists fear that overdependence on this technology will shrink our hippocampus. Indeed, when researchers at McGill University scanned the brains of older adults who used GPS and those who didn’t, they found that the people accustomed to navigating on their own had more gray matter in the hippocampus and showed less overall cognitive impairment than those who relied on GPS.

In his view, a much more likely explanation for the ability of those warblers in Tennessee to detect that distant superstorm is not infrasound but changes in atmospheric pressure, which birds are known to be able to sense.

Another pigeon was a champion distance navigator, but once he got within six miles of his loft, says Walcott, he just kind of gave up and landed in a garden somewhere.

“Although human culture is possibly 100,000 years old, songbirds have been doing ‘aesthetic culture’ on a grand scale for tens of millions of years.”

“Everything that is is adaptive.” Not miraculously, not flawlessly, but with its own kind of genius.

A new study comparing the genomes of birds suggests that, genetically speaking, the turkey is closer to its dinosaur ancestors than any other bird is; its chromosomes have undergone fewer changes than other birds since the days of feathered dinosaurs.

AS A HUMAN BEING,” Einstein once wrote, “one has been endowed with just enough intelligence to be able to see clearly how utterly inadequate that intelligence is when confronted with what exists.”