Though corvids and parrots get most of the credit for being brainy, McGowan says, “There are sleeper birds out there” that we haven’t fully appreciated.
By speeding the song up and down, they determined that Snowball actually does have a sense of tempo and rhythm. Snowball’s performance is a delight to watch, but it also helped scientists discover that birds can follow a beat. “ Snowball the Cockatoo Can Dance Better Than You.”) Video of Snowball, a captive sulphur-crested cockatoo, jamming to the Backstreet Boys took the Internet by storm a few years ago. Though palm cockatoos don’t dance while drumming, other species have exhibited a gift for boogying to a beat. Each male has a unique musical style-a rhythm of his own that he creates by beating the tools against hollow trees. When courting, male palm cockatoos of Australia use twigs and seed pods to create drumsticks. (Read: “ In a First, Bird Uses Tools to Make Sweet Music.”) CockatoosĬockatoos are the first animal observed making musical instruments.Ĭockatoos Become Drummers to Pick Up Chicks Griffin can label shapes and colors, and is working on the concept of zero. Now Pepperberg is working with another African grey, Griffin, at Harvard University. Before he died prematurely in 2007, Alex mastered roughly a hundred words, could use them in context, and even grasped the concepts of same, different, and zero.
In the 1950s, Harvard comparative psychologist Irene Pepperberg began teaching an African grey parrot, Alex, English sounds. “And they live so long that they can amass a lot of intelligence and a lot of memories.” “There’s a lot going on in those little walnut brains of theirs,” says McGowan. While many species of parrots have a penchant for human speech, the African grey parrot is the most accomplished. (Read: “ Do Crows Hold Funerals for Their Dead?”) African Grey Parrots When the researchers returned weeks later wearing the same masks, but empty-handed, the crows continued to harass them and were wary of the area for days after. In a now well-known study published in 2015 in the journal Animal Behaviour, researchers donned masks and, while holding dead, taxidermied crows, laid out food in areas frequented by crows in Washington State.Īlmost universally, the crows responded by scolding the people-and even alerting other crows in the vicinity. “They know my car, they know my walk, they know me 10 miles away from where they’ve ever encountered me before. ( Read more about how ravens hold grudges against humans.) While at first the birds living near the lab seemed to dislike McGowan for approaching their nests, they love him now that he’s started leaving the birds healthy treats. “The crows around here, they know my face,” says McGowan. Tool-Making Crows Are Even Smarter Than We Thoughtįor instance, crows are warier of new people than ravens are-but conversely are more comfortable with humans they had interacted with before, according to a study published in 2015 in the journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology.
Members of the corvid family (songbirds including ravens, crows, jays, and magpies, to name a few) are among the most intelligent birds, though common ravens may have the edge on tackling tough problems, according to McGowan. mimicking human speech or solving problems-“it always comes down to parrots and corvids,” McGowan says. “We’ve restricted the playing field to things we think only we can do.”īut if we’re talking about standard intelligence-ie. “Being able to fly to Argentina, come back, and land in the same bush-we don’t value that intelligence in a lot of other organisms,” says Kevin McGowan, an expert on crows at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, New York.
(Read: “ Think ‘Birdbrain’ Is an Insult? Think Again.”)īut what actually qualifies a bird as smart? The definition should be broader than it is, scientists say. Studies have shown, for instance, that crows make tools, ravens solve puzzles, and parrots boast a diverse vocabulary.īirds make good use of the allotted space for their tiny brains by packing in lots of neurons-more so than mammals, in fact. How smart can you be with a brain the size of a nut?Īnd yet the more we study bird intelligence, the more those assumptions are breaking down. Until the 21 st century, birds were largely dismissed as simpletons.