Birdpedia by Christopher W. Leahy

Author:Christopher W. Leahy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2021-03-03T00:00:00+00:00

Intelligence

Terms such as “booby,” “dodo,” and “birdbrain” carry the unmistakable implication that birds are not very smart. And until about 20 years ago, science seemed to corroborate this assumption. The cerebral cortex—that great wrinkly mass of “gray matter” that dominates the appearance of the human brain and is known to be the source of our subtler tricks of ratiocination—is at best a smooth, thin, covering layer in birds. For early investigators, that pretty much settled the matter of avian intelligence. It has since been discovered, however, that a bird’s “mind” originates in the relatively well-developed corpus striatum, on which the vestigial cortex rests. More specifically, avian intelligence has been located in a part of the corpus striatum called the hyperstriatum and learning centered in the bulge on the hyperstriatum called the wulst. In other words, in the evolution of intelligence, birds have taken an alternative anatomical path from that of mammals, with different parts of the brain developing to provide the physiological basis for intelligence. Another relatively recent insight is that while bird and mammal brains are both significantly more sophisticated than the brains of reptiles, there is great variation in the degree and nature of intelligence in these “smarter” classes. For example, members of some bird families do much better at certain mental tasks, such as counting and problem solving, than even relatively intelligent mammals such as monkeys. Other kinds of birds—such as pigeons, on which many early assumptions about bird intelligence were based—are dunces at the same tests. As avian IQs are more thoroughly investigated and compared, it is interesting to note that many of the birds that we intuitively think of as “smart,” for example, members of the parrot and crow families, are indeed the whiz kids of the bird world.

Another factor that delayed the recognition that at least some birds are quite brainy was the once dominant influence of animal behaviorists who theorized that almost everything a bird does is “programmed,” so to speak, into the genes it inherited from its parents and that its behavior throughout its life is essentially a combination of innate abilities (e.g., the ability to fly) and a series of unchanging, highly predictable responses to objects and events.

SO HOW SMART ARE THEY? The trap inherent in defining the intelligence of other animals is that we inevitably tend to use our own species as a kind of norm or, even more misleading, as the highest expression of evolution to date. As with the structure of the avian brain, it is more accurate to think of bird intelligence not as inferior or superior to the human version but as profoundly different. Birds experience the world very differently than people do—in many instances with superior equipment—and their needs, the driving force behind the adaptations of their brains, require different uses of intelligence.

One way of gaining an understanding of how bird intelligence functions is to observe how they use various well-defined forms of learning, the interface where instinct may be modified by experience. A very

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