Some of these bird species are among the most remarkable intelligent animals on earth—crows, jays, magpies, parrots and ravens. Recently, it has become clear that crows are so intelligent that they have unique capacities that only humans share among all animals on earth. What is quite remarkable is that they have these capacities with very different small brains that evolved separately from humans for up to fifty million years.

Summary of Bird Intelligent Abilities

Crows remember people and cars for years and have metacognition and counting. They use tools better than most primates. They upgrade tools, molding wire into a hook and use three different tools for one task, more than chimps. They build hooked stick tools very carefully observing each feature of the tool before use to make sure it can help with prey. They hide them for future use.

Crows are able to use analogies—solving higher-order, relational-matching tasks spontaneously. Crows understand that dropping stones in a water bottle connected with a tube raised the water level at a distance to get a floating piece of meat.

Other Birds

Cockatoos rapidly perform five sequential steps to unlock a cage—remove a pin, screw and then bolt; turn a wheel 90 degrees; and shift a latch. Birds who watched the first attempt did all steps immediately and never forgot them for years. Recently, an entire flock of jays sat still for a fallen comrade, mourning for 48 hours without any foraging for food. Alex the parrot showed skills for arithmetic and advanced language. He invented new words—“bannery” for a combination of banana and cherry. He could count, add to 8 and understood zero. Just before he died, he told Dr. Pepperberg “You be good. I love you.” Parrots understand sharing, relating actions in the near time to human’s future. Birds use smells for navigation of thousands of miles. Birds take gyroscope readings at takeoff and compare them to their home readings.

Birds store seeds in up to thousands of different places and remember these for hours and months. Clark’s nutcracker stores 5000 seeds in different caches and then gets them 9 months later. Bowerbirds use advanced perspective, actively selecting specific material for their nests that hide them against the background. They choose to match the colors. They deliberately manipulate perception of color. Ravens can understand other bird’s rank by observation. Ravens have very complex societies with shifting political alliances. Pigeons memorize routes by using landscape properties and landmarks. Songbirds learn songs, grammar and syntax from a mentor, like humans, and then practice them. Songbirds name their children, who are known by that sound for life.

Their use of different tweets is more complex than monkey’s signals. Songbirds prefer singing in harmonic series similar to humans even though anatomically they could sing many other ways. They choose to sing in a particular key and with consonant intervals, octaves, fifths and fourths like humans. Songs are used for mating and defending territory Songbirds use different language dialects like humans.

Unique Bird Brains
Two critical parts of the the human cortex develop from different fetal stem cells—the striatum (habit and movement memory) and the cortex for decision making, and complex analysis of sensory motor function. The striatum is very important in learning skills, particular motor skills including vocal learning and songs.

Birds were thought not to have a cortex at all. Most higher order neurons were considered to be like the striatum. But, now it is shown that what appears to be the bird’s telencephalon is equivalent to a cortex derived from similar types of stem cells during fetal life. A similar type of cell becomes the mammal’s cortex and birds’ dorsal ventricular ridge (DVR). The DVR was discussed in detail in the previous post on songbird vocal learning. Very few of these neurons are from the types of cells in the striatum.

BIO267 F13 06 wik Brain ComparisonsWhile there are some organizational similarities with humans, the birds’ brain structure is quite different. Different unique structures surround the DVR. One view is that a dorsal region becomes the neocortex in mammals for vision, touch and position sensation, and a similar region forms cortex-like regions in birds called the Wulst. The lateral region becomes smell regions in humans, and piriform cortex in birds.

In humans the neo cortex is in the back and in birds this cortex-equivalent is in the front along with the DVR. Both the human cortex and the Wulst perform many of the same functions in different ways. Mammals have six layers in the cortex with lots of connections; below there are deep structures with physical functions and immediate response to external stimulation (striatum, thalamus, midbrain, brainstem). Birds, instead of cortical layers, have neuronal nuclei with fewer connections and less layers. In owls, who have incredible visual acuity, the Wulst for primary processing of vision has more layers that are slightly similar to human cortex.