The Genius of Birds

by Jennifer Ackerman

Until Alex, we thought we were alone in our use of words, or almost alone. Alex could not only comprehend words, he could use them to talk back with cogency, intelligence, and perhaps even feeling. His final words to Pepperberg as she put him back in his cage the night before he died were his daily refrain: “You be good, see you tomorrow. I love you.”

In 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.

Carrion crows use passing cars to crush especially tough nuts, such as walnuts, that won’t break by simply falling on pavement. The now-famous video of these crows in a city in Japan shows one stationed above a pedestrian crossing. When the light turns red, it positions its nut on the crossing, then flies back to the perch and waits while the light changes and traffic passes; when the light turns red again, it flutters down to safely collect the cracked nut. If no car smashed the nut, the bird repositions it.

In some parts of the island, the crows make wide tools primarily. In others, more narrow tools. The stepped-tool design is the one that’s the most widespread over the island. On the island of Mare, just adjacent to New Caledonia, says Hunt, the crows make only wide tools. In other words, it seems there may be local styles or traditions of toolmaking that are passed down over generations.

One clear sunny February morning in the central mountains of Hokkaido, Japan, naturalist Mark Brazil noticed two ravens on a steep slope of fresh powdery snow. One of the ravens lay on its breast and slid down the slope; its partner rolled, legs in the air, wings flicking. “The pair continued this ‘sledging’ and rolling downhill for more than ten metres before flying back upslope,” wrote Brazil, then repeated the hotdogging. Crows, too, have been known to slide down slopes, apparently for fun. Carrion crows were caught on camera in Japan skidding down a children’s slide. Not long ago, a video from Russia of a crow snowboarding down a roof with a jar lid went viral.

There are reports of a bullfinch trained to sing “God Save the King,” a gray catbird sounding "Taps" (which it may have picked up from burial services at a nearby cemetery), and a crested lark in southern Germany that learned to imitate the four whistling notes a shepherd used to work his herding dogs. So faithful were the imitations that the dogs instantly obeyed the bird’s whistled commands, which included “Run ahead!” “Fast!” “Halt!” and “Come here!” These whistled calls subsequently spread to other larks, creating a little pocket of local “catchphrases” (and, quite possibly, some very winded sheepdogs).

Parrots have been known to teach other parrots to talk smack. 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. The ornithologist at the museum speculated that the wild birds had learned from once-domesticated cockatoos and other parrots that had escaped and survived long enough to join a flock and share words they had picked up in captivity—if true, a fine example of cultural transmission.

Extravagance in nature is so often found in proximity to sex.

To probe whether birds might be capable of making distinctions based on human concepts of beauty, Watanabe trained pigeons to distinguish between “good” and “bad” paintings, as defined by human critics. He found that the birds could indeed pick out the beautiful from the ugly using cues of color, pattern, and texture.

Officials in Cuba still use the birds to transmit election results from remote mountainous areas, and the Chinese have lately built a force of ten thousand messenger pigeons to deliver military communications between troops stationed along their borders, in case of “electromagnetic interference or a collapse in our signals,” as the officer in charge of the pigeon army explains.

Lots of creatures, from bees to whales, perceive magnetic fields and use them to orient. However, we’re still not certain how animals sense the fields. Detecting them with sensitive electronic instruments is one thing. But “sensing magnetic fields as weak as that of the Earth is not easy using only biological materials,” says Henrik Mouritsen, a biologist who studies the mechanisms underlying animal navigation at the University of Oldenburg in Germany. Birds possess no obvious sense organ devoted to the task. But because the field can pervade tissue, the sensors may be hidden deep within their bodies.

Blue tits feeding their nestlings won’t enter a nest box if it has been laced with the scent of a weasel. And they’ll sniff out fresh yarrow, apple mint, and lavender, and ferry fragments to their nest cups to protect their chicks from pathogenic bacteria and parasites.

In some cities, you can find smoked cigarette butts in sparrow nests, which effectively function as a parasite repellent. Butts from smoked cigarettes retain large amounts of nicotine and other toxic substances, including traces of pesticides that repel all kinds of harmful creepy crawlies—an apparently ingenious new use of materials.