I recently had a birding accident. Sort of. With my camera and binoculars over my left shoulder, I tripped and fell. To protect my gear I put out my right hand which held my phone and it broke. My hand that is. The phone is fine. This was not the first fall I’ve had birding. But it is the first one in my living room. No joke.
To be specific, I broke a finger. My typing finger. So I've been slow to blog. To make matters worse, I’ve got a cast up to my elbow and can’t even hold my camera. Oh well.
While mending, I’ve been reading a book by Jennifer Ackerman called The Genius of Birds. As you might guess she suggests birds are pretty bright. Much more intelligent than we’ve thought anyway. She makes a good case.
American Crow
Some birds, particularly Corvids (crows, magpies jays etc.) and parrots turn out to be especially smart. Some show intelligence equal to mammals. Occasionally even that of gorillas and orangutans.
New Caledonian crows for example use simple tools to get at food. Some, figure out how to use one tool that doesn’t work to get food to get at a more useful one that can. Some of these crows actually learn from their seniors to build elaborate hook tools to get food in the wild. Other Corvids (perhaps you’ve seen them on U-tube) famously drop nuts on busy intersection crosswalks and wait for traffic to pass. Then when the light turns red, they casually pick up the spoils.
Some crows will watch where others stash food, then go back and steal it later. (But only if they’ve previously had their own cache purloined. Bird relativism?)
Some parrots not only mimic human speech but understand and correctly use the words they’ve learned. Pigeons can recognize human faces, even in art, and of course can find their way home better than Siri. Ornithologists daily discover new evidence of bird intelligence.
African Gray Parrot
So the question has now become: how do those bird brains work? Scientists are beginning to put them under the microscope.
Literally.
By mapping neural connections in their brains. Or studying genes and brain chemistry associated with specific behaviors like social relationships.
And in the process they have found something fascinating: a large number of unexpected similarities between the brains of birds and humans.
For example birds' brains are divided into hemispheres that control different things, somewhat the way ours do.
Gene studies have surprised scientists with amazing similarities of song learning to the language learning process of humans. We also share the same pattern of brain activity during sleep.
The list goes on. The more they study, the more similarities they find.
Of course, I don’t think anyone is suggesting a Nobel Prize for gathering grubs on a stick. But it does seem these new findings indicate that not only are birds smarter than we ever imagined, but that human and bird brains are more alike than we’d probably like to admit. And that's astonishing. Especially considering some birds' brains are no bigger than a pea.
Though thinking it over. It would explain a lot. :)
(A recent newsletter by an excellent birder and friend, Hap Ellis: Bird News Items cites two new studies bolstering Ms. Ackerman’s point.) mailto:[email protected]
