Jennifer Ackerman - The Genius of Birds

F or a long time, the knock on birds was that theyre stupid. Beady eyed and nut brained. Reptiles with wings. Pigeon heads. Turkeys. They fly into windows, peck at their reflections, buzz into power lines, blunder into extinction.

Our language reflects our disrespect. Something worthless or unappealing is for the birds. An ineffectual politician is a lame duck. To lay an egg is to flub a performance. To be henpecked is to be harassed with persistent nagging. Eating crow is eating humble pie. The expression bird brain, for a stupid, foolish, or scatterbrained person, entered the English language in the early 1920s because people thought of birds as mere flying, pecking automatons, with brains so small they had no capacity for thought at all.

That view is a gone goose. In the past two decades or so, from fields and laboratories around the world have flowed examples of bird species capable of mental feats comparable to those found in primates. Theres a kind of bird that creates colorful designs out of berries, bits of glass, and blossoms to attract females, and another kind that hides up to thirty-three thousand seeds scattered over dozens of square miles and remembers where it put them months later. Theres a species that solves a classic puzzle at nearly the same pace as a five-year-old child, and one thats an expert at picking locks. There are birds that can count and do simple math, make their own tools, move to the beat of music, comprehend basic principles of physics, remember the past, and plan for the future.

In the past, other animals have gotten all the publicity for their near-human cleverness. Chimps make stick spears to hunt smaller primates and dolphins communicate in a complex system of whistles and clicks. Great apes console one another and elephants mourn the loss of their own.

Now birds have joined the party. A flood of new research has overturned the old views, and people are finally starting to accept that birds are far more intelligent than we ever imaginedin some ways closer to our primate relatives than to their reptilian ones.

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.

, reports began to roll in from New Caledonia, a small island in the South Pacific, of crows that fashion their own tools in the wild and appear to transmit local styles of toolmaking from one generation to the nexta feat reminiscent of human culture and proof that sophisticated tool skills do not require a primate brain.

When scientists presented these crows with puzzles to test their problem-solving abilities, the birds astonished them with their crafty solutions. In 2002, Alex Kacelnik and his colleagues at Oxford University asked a captive New Caledonian crow named Betty, thats out of reach in a little bucket at the bottom of this tube? Betty blew away the experimenters by spontaneously bending a piece of wire into a hook tool to pull up the little bucket.

Among the published studies tumbling from scientific journals are some with titles that lift the brows: Have we met before? Pigeons recognize familiar human faces; The syntax of gargles in the chickadee; Language discrimination by Java sparrows; Chicks like consonant music; Personality differences explain leadership in barnacle geese; and Pigeons on par with primates in numerical competence.

BIRD BRAIN: The slur came from the belief that birds had brains so diminutive they had to be devoted only to instinctual behavior. The avian brain had no cortex like ours, where all the smart stuff happens. Birds had minimal noggins for good reason, we thought: to allow for airborne ways; to defy gravity; to hover, arabesque, dive, soar for days on end, migrate thousands of miles, and maneuver in tight spaces. For their mastery of air, it seemed, birds paid a heavy cognitive penalty.

A closer look has taught us otherwise. Birds do indeed have brains very different from our ownand no wonder. Humans and birds have been evolving independently for a very long time, since our last common ancestor more than 300 million years ago. But some birds, in fact, have relatively large brains for their body size, just as we do. Moreover, when it comes to brainpower, size seems to matter less than the number of neurons, where theyre located, and how theyre connected. , it turns out, pack very high numbers of neurons where it counts, with densities akin to those found in primates, and links and connections much like ours. This may go a long way toward explaining why certain birds have such sophisticated cognitive abilities.

the what, where, and when of an event, called episodic memory, suggests to some scientists the possibility that these jays may be able to travel back into the past in their own mindsa key component of the kind of mental time travel once vaunted as uniquely human.

songbirds learn their songs the way we learn languages and pass these tunes along in rich cultural traditions that began tens of millions of years ago, when our primate ancestors were still scuttling about on all fours.

Some birds are born Euclideans, capable of using geometric clues and landmarks to orient themselves in three-dimensional space, navigate through unknown territory, and locate hidden treasures. Others are born accountants. , as well, such as addition and subtraction.

Bird brains may be little, but its plain they punch well above their weight.

BIRDS HAVE NEVER SEEMED dumb to me. In fact, few other creatures appear so alert, so alive in fiber and faculty, so endowed with perpetual oomph. Sure, Ive heard the story of the raven attempting to crack open a Ping-Pong ball, presumably to get at an egglike morsel within. A friend of mine, while vacationing in Switzerland, watched a peacock try to fan its broad tail during a mistral. It toppled over, stood upright again, fanned again, and tipped over again, six or seven times in a row. Each spring the robins nesting in our cherry tree attack the side mirror of our car as if it were a rival, pecking furiously at their own reflections while streaking the door with guano.