Gisela Kaplan - Bird Minds: Cognition and Behaviour of Australian Native Birds

BIRD MINDS

Cognition and Behaviour of Australian Native Birds

Gisela Kaplan

Gisela Kaplan 2015

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National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Kaplan, Gisela, author.
Bird minds: cognition and behaviour of Australian native birds/Gisela Kaplan.

9781486300181 (paperback)
9781486300198 (epdf)
9781486300204 (epub)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Birds Australia Behavior.
Birds Psychology.
Animal intelligence.

598.07234994

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Front cover: Major Mitchell Cockatoos (photo: Keith Lightbody)

Back cover: author photo by Lesley Rogers

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Contents

Preface

The idea for this book had its beginning some 15 years ago when our galah, at the age of 75, learned new words. If ever there was evidence of a plastic brain, he showed it convincingly but there was relatively little to which it could be related in Australian species at the time. There were few papers that discussed the cognitive ability of Australian cockatoos, or other birds for that matter. Of course, there had been important ideas and observations about the cognitive and emotional dimensions in a long and weighty history of avian behaviour as the writings by Charles Darwin (1890, 1965, 1981), then Niko Tinbergen (1953), W. H. Thorpe (1956), Konrad Lorenz (1966) and others attest. From the late 1970s onwards, it was once again raised as a possibility that some birds and other animals may have plastic brains (Kroodsma and Miller 1996), may have minds of their own and are capable of actions beyond those that are pre-programmed, adaptive or merely copied from others (Griffin 1984, 1992; Roitblat 1987; Ristau 1991; Rogers 1997; Basil et al. 1996; Balda et al. 1998).

The last decades have been extremely exciting for anyone in animal behaviour working with birds, primates or a range of other species. For a host of reasons, the last decades have seen many breathtaking discoveries that have changed forever the landscape of our knowledge about animal cognition and related fields. It is now hard to imagine how people thought before the 1980s, so vast have the changes been, be this in discoveries in field research or in the identification of new methods or theories resulting in robust data and clear evidence of complex cognition in birds.

Hence, my search for evidence of problem solving, tool use and other indices of intelligence in Australian birds became a road of discovery, spreading the search for the printed record to well over 100 years, strewn with new and surprising insights and findings. This book is timely because there are new theories and novel experimental techniques and methods for data collection available that enable us to probe into cognitive processes of birds in previously unimaginable ways.

Vertebrates are able to perform cognitively complex tasks, solve complex problems and generally show behaviour suggesting much more awareness than had once been assumed. Indeed, it is now known that some birds have many of the attributes once thought to be specific to humans and great apes.

Who would have thought that the humble chicken understood object permanence, was capable of distinguishing biological motion, could perceive illusions, could perform basic arithmetic and geometry and even had referential signals for various alarm calls, or that pigeons understand principles of same/different and were capable of quite abstract generalisations as in identifying concepts such as forest versus individual trees or shrubs? The problem of having been captive long term somehow seemed to suggest, however, that chickens and pigeons had been selected for these skills because of their long exposure to humans (i.e. their abilities were artefacts that might not pertain to birds in the wild). So the new wave of interest in cognitive ornithology was to find evidence of intelligence in wild-caught birds, either by capturing them and seeing how they behave under experimental conditions in laboratories, or by somehow exposing their cognitive capacity in the wild. Ravens, crows and a few parrots have been riding on a crest of fame fanned by journalists worldwide about their amazing and newly discovered abilities of problem solving, tool using, episodic memory, planning and many other attributes.

There has been a different emphasis in Australia and one that is more than of marginal importance because it deeply altered the way in which avian evolution could be perceived. Eleanor Russell (1989) implored us to think from a Gondwanan perspective. The question is why one should, and the inspiring work in taxonomy gave the answer: birds evolved in Australia. In the last 1015 years, large-scale DNA-sequence analyses have revolutionised our understanding of the evolution of the worlds avifauna, as Christidis and Norman (2010) explained recently. It has led to an enormously active and exciting period in Australian taxonomy, continuing to correct misconceptions and wrong attributions. The evidence now makes it conclusive that there is a very special relationship between Australia and birds.

I was recently asked whether there is anything special about Australian birds. This was one of those heart-stopping moments when one feels one ought to be able to reply with a few well-expressed sentences and yet make the enormity of the implied misconception clear. But to answer it, I found it necessary to write a whole book in reply.

It will take a while for other countries and for Australians themselves to come to terms with the findings. The misconceptions have been substantial, both in the northern hemisphere and in Australia. One of them arose within the recent social history of Australia. Settlers arriving here in the 19th century, often from the British Isles and continental Europe, were confronted by a land so very strange that the simplest emotional response (of course not the only one) to the strange plants was to call them scrub (good for burning) and the animals inferior (good at best for shooting and eating) and, if possible, replace them with species known and familiar to the new settlers. These same well-meaning settlers produced the largest known transfer of invasive species and foisted on this continent the most large-scale and highly destructive onslaught known on the planet, both in flora or fauna. History must excuse their deeds for they believed indeed that the continent was a barren world where only the lowliest of plants and animals had persisted.