The Genius of Birds

Praise for The Genius of Birds

Lovely, celebratory. For all the belittling of ‘bird brains,’ [Ackerman] shows them to be uniquely impressive machines.

—The New York Times Book Review

"[A] gloriously provocative and highly entertaining book. Jennifer Ackerman provides a masterly survey of research in the last two decades that has produced a revolution in our understanding of bird cognition. The Genius of Birds [is] important not only for what it says about birds, but also about the human ingenuity entailed in unraveling the mysteries of the avian brain. It is at once a book of knowledge but also a work of wonder and an affirmation of the astonishing complexity of our world."

—The Wall Street Journal

Ackerman is a pro at parsing scientific concepts in an accessible style, and her lyrical writing underscores her appreciation for the beauty and adaptability of birds.

—BookPage

Ackerman writes with a light but assured touch, her prose rich in fact but economical in delivering it. Fans of birds in all their diversity will want to read this one.

—Kirkus Reviews

"Richly researched . . . The Genius of Birds provides engrossing evidence that will have readers looking at birds in a completely new way."

—The Daily Progress

A lyrical testimony to the wonders of avian intelligence.

—Scientific American

Ackerman offers plenty of interesting tidbits and backs them up with the relevant history or science, using footnotes to avoid cluttering the text with anything that might slow a reader down. This is one of those terrific books that makes a scientific topic fun without dumbing it down.

—The Washington Independent Review of Books

"I love birds; always have. The only thing better than love is love plus deep appreciation. The Genius of Birds is a journey of deep appreciation for the beautiful geniuses all around us, in our gardens, sharing our air, and sharing more of our minds than we might have expected."

—Carl Safina, author of Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel

"Delightful, revolutionary, and illuminated by the clean, curious gaze of an intelligent seeker, The Genius of Birds is fueled by awe and always, its close cousin, deep respect for the condition of life. It’s a book that demands a moral consideration of the world."

—Rick Bass, author of The Ninemile Wolves and For A Little While: New and Selected Stories

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jennifer Ackerman has been writing about science, nature, and human biology for almost three decades. Her most recent books include Sex Sleep Eat Drink Dream: A Day in the Life of Your Body; Ah-Choo!: The Uncommon Life of Your Common Cold; Chance in the House of Fate: A Natural History of Heredity; and Notes from the Shore. A contributor to Scientific American, National Geographic, The New York Times, and many other publications, Ackerman is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Nonfiction, a Bunting Fellowship, and a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

PENGUIN BOOKS

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

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First published in the United States of America by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2016

Published in Penguin Books 2017

Copyright © 2016 by Jennifer Ackerman

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

Ebook ISBN 9781101980842

Illustrations by John Burgoyne

Cover design: Gabriele Wilson

Cover illustration: Eunike Nugroho

btb_ppg_c0_r7

For Karl (1955–2016), with all my love

Contents

Praise for The Genius of Birds

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction: The Genius of Birds

ONE • FROM DODO TO CROW: Taking the Measure of a Bird Mind

TWO • THE BIRD WAY: The Avian Brain Revisited

THREE • BOFFINS: Technical Wizardry

FOUR • TWITTER: Social Savvy

FIVE • FOUR HUNDRED TONGUES: Vocal Virtuosity

SIX • THE BIRD ARTIST: Aesthetic Aptitude

SEVEN • A MAPPING MIND: Spatial (and Temporal) Ingenuity

EIGHT • SPARROWVILLE: Adaptive Genius

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Introduction

THE GENIUS OF BIRDS

For a long time, the knock on birds was that they’re 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. There’s 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. There’s a species that solves a classic puzzle at nearly the same pace as a five-year-old child, and one that’s 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 imagined—in some ways closer to our primate relatives than to their reptilian ones.

Beginning in the 1980s, the charming and cunning African grey parrot named Alex partnered with scientist Irene Pepperberg to show the world that some birds appear to have intellectual abilities rivaling those of primates. Before Alex died suddenly at the age of thirty-one (half his expected life span), he had mastered a vocabulary of hundreds of English labels for objects, colors, and shapes. He understood the categories of same and different in number, color, and shape. He could look at a tray holding an array of objects of various colors and materials and say how many there were of a certain type. How many green keys? Pepperberg would ask, displaying several green and orange keys and corks. Eight out of ten times, Alex got it right. He could use numbers to answer questions about addition. Among his greatest triumphs, says Pepperberg, were his knowledge of abstract concepts, including a zerolike concept; his capacity to figure out the meaning of a number label from its position in the number line; and his ability to sound out words the way a child does: N-U-T. Until Alex, we thought 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.

In the 1990s, 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 next—a 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, Can you get the food that’s 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 own—and 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 they’re located, and how they’re connected. And some bird brains, 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.

Like our brains, the brains of birds are lateralized; they have sides that process different kinds of information. They also have the ability to replace old brain cells with new ones just when they’re needed most. And although avian brains are organized in an entirely different way from our brains, they share similar genes and neural circuits, and are capable of feats of quite extraordinary mental power. To wit: Magpies can recognize their own image in a mirror, a grasp of self once thought limited to humans, great apes, elephants, and dolphins and linked to highly developed social understanding. Western scrub jays use Machiavellian tactics to hide their food caches from other jays—but only if they’ve stolen food themselves. These birds seem to have a rudimentary ability to know what other birds are thinking and, perhaps, to grasp their perspective. They can also remember what kind of food they buried in a particular place—and when—so they can retrieve the morsel before it spoils. This ability to remember 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 minds—a key component of the kind of mental time travel once vaunted as uniquely human.

News has arrived that 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. In 2015 researchers found that newborn chicks spatially map numbers from left to right, as most humans do (left means less; right means more). This suggests that birds share with us a left-to-right orientation system—a cognitive strategy that underlies our human capacity for higher mathematics. Baby birds can also understand proportion and can learn to choose a target from an array of objects on the basis of its ordinal position (third, eighth, ninth). They can do simple arithmetic, as well, such as addition and subtraction.

Bird brains may be little, but it’s 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, I’ve 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.

But who among us hasn’t been toppled by our vanity or made an enemy of our own image?

I’ve watched birds most of my life and have always admired their pluck and focus and the taut, quick vitality that seems almost too much for their tiny bodies to contain. As Louis Halle once wrote, A man would be worn out in short order by such intensity of living. The common species I saw around my old neighborhood appeared to negotiate the world with brisk curiosity and aplomb. The American crows striding around our garbage cans with a prince’s proprietary air looked like highly resourceful creatures. I once watched a crow stack two crackers in the middle of a road before flying off to a safe spot to devour his collected booty.

One year, an eastern screech owl roosted in a box on a maple tree just a few yards from my kitchen window. In the daylight hours, the owl slept, only its round head showing, perfectly framed in the round hole facing the window. But at night, the owl was gone from the box, off hunting in the night. As the dawn light rose, there were signs of his brilliant success—the wing of a mourning dove or songbird hanging from the hole of the box, twitching, twitching, before it was yanked inside.

Even the red knots I encountered on the beaches of Delaware Bay, not the mentally swiftest of birds, seemed to know where to be—and when—to catch the rich feast of eggs laid by horseshoe crabs each full moon in spring. What calendar of sky drew these birds northward and told them where to go?

~

I LEARNED ABOUT BIRDS from a pair of Bills. The first was my father, Bill Gorham, who began taking me birdwatching near our home in Washington, D.C., when I was seven or eight. It was the Beltway version of a Swedish gökotta—the act of rising early to appreciate nature—and it was one of the palpable joys of my childhood. On early weekend mornings in spring we left the house in the dark and headed to the woods along the Potomac River to catch the dawn chorus, that mysterious moment when birds sing with a thousand voices in A Music numerous as space— / But neighboring as Noon, as Emily Dickinson wrote.

My father learned about birds as a Boy Scout from a nearly blind man named Apollo Taleporos. The old man relied on his ears alone to pick up species. Parula warbler. Yellow-rumped warbler. Towhee. The birds are there! he would call out to the boys. Go find them! My father got very good at identifying birds by their calls—the melodious flutelike song of the wood thrush, the soft whichity, whichity of a common yellowthroat, or the clear whistling call of a white-throated sparrow.