The Genius of Birds

by Jennifer Ackerman

It was the Beltway version of a Swedish gökotta—the act of rising early to appreciate nature—and it was one of the palpable joys of my childhood.

IN ANY CASE, says Lefebvre, “you have to watch your vocabulary.” He points to a study published recently on empathy in mice and one on mental time travel in birds, which raised both eyebrows and doubts. “I’m not questioning the experiments—they are sound, and they do not anthropomorphize,” he says. “But perhaps we go too far in the words we use to describe what we think is going on.”

“Intelligence is a very general capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience.”

If one of the species you’re using in your experiment fails every test you give it, the problem may be you, the researcher, not the animal. You may have failed to understand what is relevant to the way a bird sees the world.”

They test for insight by trying to determine whether a bird’s discovery of a solution is a sudden flash of understanding (eureka!) or gradual and more reflexive (trial and error).

“Honestly, initially I didn’t think it would work,” he says. Anecdotes are considered unscientific; they’re “weak data,” in the lingo. “If one anecdote is unscientific, how can two thousand anecdotes become science?

paradoxical result sometimes boggles the mind: A frigate bird with a seven-foot wingspan has a skeleton that weighs less than its feathers.

(“People have the mistaken impression that science is all about thinking and experimenting,” Loissel quips, “when a lot of time is actually spent chopping tomatoes or cutting beef into tiny cubes.”)

The New Yorker once reported that “after weeks of silence, the first words uttered by a Westchester parakeet were, ‘Talk, damn you, talk!’”

In the earliest such study, he trained eight pigeons to distinguish between the works of Picasso and Monet.

Indeed, scientists have trained honeybees to tell a Picasso from a Monet.

When I asked Gerald Borgia if he thought bowerbirds might have an aesthetic sense, a special feel for the beautiful, he said he had no idea.

Instead, he gathers up the blue objects of his world and lays them out. He designs. He builds. He sings. He dances. The female, with great acuity, marks his efforts. Sharp, attentive, creative? If she likes what she sees, she offers him her body. And so it goes.

As we lose the habit of forming cognitive maps, we may be losing gray matter (and along with it, if Tolman is right, our capacity for social understanding).

This is true for humans, too. Studies show that small but varied groups of three to five people crack intellectual tasks faster than even the brightest individuals. Psychologist Steven Pinker goes so far as to argue that group living and the opportunity it offered our ancestors to learn from one another set the stage for the evolution of humanlike intelligence.