Weekend Birdery/Wordery: “Birdbrain”
I don’t think anyone actually uses the pejorative “birdbrain” anymore, but somehow we all know what it means. Maybe from children’s shows or something.
In researching this post, I’ve come to believe that “birdbrain” usage survives now solely as a cheesy trope of news, journal, and (eh hem) blog writing, where it is offered up as an illustration of colloquial folly, a straw man that the author proceeds to dispatch by adducing the latest research in avian intelligence. We at weekend wordery disdain such stale hackery.
On the other hand, we at weekend birdery are not above the occasional prose gimick when necessary. So, whether or not the existence of the term “birdbrain” implicates a widespread belief that birds are stupid, it would be a pernicious myth if it did. And any myth as pernicious as this one should be dispelled at every opportunity, even one fabricated entirely for the purpose of setting it right.
Therefore I am announcing a series of posts, beginning with this one, to illustrate just how smart birds can be. First, a caveat: For the most part, all animals—present conspecifics included—are dumb. But with that proviso, birds are not, relatively speaking, a particularly dumb class of animals. (Note: if you can conjure David Attenborough’s voice in your mind’s ear, cue it up now:) And indeed, as we’ll see over the course of this series, birds are, quite often, remarkably clever. And the cleverest of all the birds…are the corvids.
Corvids, a family that includes crows and jays (as well as rooks, ravens, and magpies), have displayed a measure of cunning that surpasses not only other birds, but also most mammals—even, in some respects, the non-human great apes. Here’s a sampling of what research and observation have taught us about corvid intelligence:
- An individual European Magpie can recognize itself in a mirror (a rare capacity for non-mammals).
- Carrion Crows in Japan have been observed dropping hard nuts in crosswalks, waiting for cars to drive over them and crack their shells. (See for yourself.)
- Ravens have exhibited the ability to tactically deceive one another in order to hoarde food or to raid each others’ stashes.
- Western Scrub Jays have demonstrated episodic memory (that is, memory of specific past events ) and the ability to plan for future contingencies based on past experience and observation. (Via Ed Yong.)
- Rooks have evinced an elementary understanding of Archimedes’ Principle, dropping rocks into a tall cylinder to raise the water level therein, so that they could reach a worm floating on the surface. (Watch it. Via Ed Yong, again.)
- Many corvids are known to use tools—for example, a stick to get a grub out of a small hole. But the New Caledonian Crow can make and modify tools (like hooks) and can even use tools to make or acquire other tools.
I’ll explore some of these studies and others in more detail in posts to follow.
A New Caledonian crow uses a stick tool to extract mealworms from a drilled log in the Oxford laboratory.
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Indeed! The canny corvids. Nice post.
A side note: songbirds have an additional uncommon intelligence, ‘vocal learning’: http://newswire.rockefeller.edu/index.php?page=engine&id=950.
Also, one other avian malapropism: to eat like a bird. As may be the case with birdbrain, it’s unlikely that anyone has been accused of eating like a bird since the 1950s, if ever, but it is widely understood to convey a meaning that badly underestimates our feathered friends.
Thanks for the link. Interesting stuff, and great science writing. Yours, right? (No clear byline, but I see your name as the “contact” for the piece, so….)
I’m tempted to make the totally unqualified speculation that the benefits of early vocal skills (more food vis-a-vis sibling competitors) provides a sort of explanation for mate-selection behavior later on. Instead of females initially selecting males with “better” songs just because, well, their offspring will likely be good singers too (a totally unsatisfying and circular explanation), the females’ choices could be explained by reference to the real benefits of being a more skilled vocalizer (more variation => more food). At least for the early part of the evolutionary process, I mean. Later, the selection system becomes self-propelling. Anyway, I find that possibility somehow satisfying.
I don’t remember ever hearing the phrase “eat like a bird,” and it wasn’t immediately obvious to me what it meant: viz., not eating much. “Pecking at your food” is what we’d say now, I guess. And that makes sense.
But truly eating like a bird would be more like going to 37 different restaurants a day, several times each, and dropping off doggy bags at home, work, your parents’, buddies’, girlfriend’s, and other girlfriend’s places in between.
[...] propos of last week’s birdery post, here is video of Carrion Crows in Japan using cars as [...]
[...] If that hypothesis is correct, it will give the lie to the (not-exactly-common) English word for an aggregation of Corvus corax, “an unkindness of ravens.” It seems these corvids just don’t want to live according to our labels. [...]