The Bird Way: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think

by Jennifer Ackerman

In other words, say the researchers, bird brains have the potential to provide much higher cognitive clout per pound than do mammalian brains.

nature has two strategies: It can tinker with the number of neurons and their size, and also, it can change their distribution in different parts of the brain.

The birds doze while in flight, usually one brain hemisphere at a time, but they also fall into whole-brain sleep—just for a few seconds at a time—a quick in-flight power nap.

It taught us about the impressive visual and memory capacities of pigeons, for instance: In a laboratory setting, pigeons can remember hundreds of images for longer than a year. And because of their ability to make subtle visual distinctions, they have even been trained to detect the difference between normal and cancerous tissue in mammograms—with more accuracy than a trained technician. But

Head and neck “craning” forward means “ready to fly,” a signal to the family. Head lifted high at right angles to erect neck, bare red skin expanded, means “on alert,” watching for potential threat. Feather tuft on top of head sleeked down: mild arousal.

Clearly birds are master eavesdroppers, listening in on alarms sounded by other birds.

“We have this really sophisticated language to communicate extremely detailed concepts,” says McLachlan, “but when we’re communicating urgently about danger, we don’t use helpful words that describe what it is, where it is, how close it is—nothing useful.”

The discovery arose from a serendipitous conversation with field engineers at an oil company, who had been aware for some time that turkey vultures have knowing noses, and used the birds to locate leaks in natural gas lines. The engineers had figured out that if they introduced ethyl mercaptan into the line, they could locate leaks by the concentrations of turkey vultures circling above the line or sitting on the ground next to

Food triggers memories not just of the stuff itself but where and when it was eaten. There’s a good reason for that. So important to survival are deeply rewarding high-value food events that the brain prioritizes their recall and stores them in a privileged place. The process may involve dopamine, a chemical known to be important for rewards, and the hippocampus, the brain region critical to long-term memory in both humans and birds.

Sexual selection may run counter to natural selection, driving the evolution of extravagant male courtship traits that actually hinder survival tasks such as finding food and avoiding predators. In this way, males may end up with elaborate traits and displays that are burdensome but so sexy they’re perpetuated in the population.