The Genius Of Birds by Jennifer Ackerman

I. Brief Summary

This book debunks the theory of “birds are unintelligent.” The book features several observations and reserarh studies focusing on various cognitieve capabilities of birds ranging from – social, vocal and spaital awareness. After reading this book, I certainly wante to get into birdwatching because they seem to be even more fascinating after reading this book.

II. Big Ideas

• Ackerman explores classic examples of the exceptional intelligence of parrots, as well as lesser known instances of aviary acumen found in less exotic birds such as chickadees and sparrows.
• Ackerman’s definition of genius is flexibility in meeting environmental and social challenges. That’s a lower bar than IQ.
• Intelligence comes in many forms. Social, vocal, spatial, technical, and aesthetic intelligence are separate skills. Ackerman treats them as “evolutionary stepping stones” for solving problems in the natural world.
• Birds are individuals. Some get bored quickly, some take risks that harm them, and some are committed to their partners.
• Being clever doesn’t guarantee survival. Intelligence does not automatically improve a species’ survival in new or unstable environments. Bold birds explore fast but can trade away accuracy.
• An underlying question runs through the whole book: do we judge birds by standards that suit our own needs rather than theirs?
• Birds have been around much longer than we have, and are not driving the sixth mass extinction, which complicates our claim to be the smart ones. Their brilliance doesn’t protect them from our choices. Protecting it means protecting habitat: the trees, the canopy, the upslope refuges.
• Ackerman closes by asking whether we will accept a diminished world of sparrow-like generalists or work to preserve avian diversity, arguing every species has its own form of genius.
• Corvids and parrots rank most innovative; quails, ostriches, and turkeys rank lowest. Bird brains are dense. Corvids and parrots place nearly 80 percent of neurons in cortex-like structures.
• Green-backed Herons used insects as bait to catch fish, and vultures in Zimbabwe waited on fences near minefields for animals to set off the explosives.
• Science spent about a century assuming birds couldn’t think in complex ways because they lack a layered neocortex. The fix came when researchers showed birds have a cortex-like structure, the dorsal ventricular ridge, organized in clusters rather than layers.
• Relative size matters more than absolute size. An elephant’s brain is under 1% of its body mass, while a New Caledonian crow’s is about 3.75%.
• City crows adapt too: carrion crows in Japan were filmed placing nuts in crosswalks, letting traffic crush them, then retrieving them when the light changed.
• American crows recognize individual human faces, remember dangerous people for at least nine years, and share that information.
• Zebra finch song learning parallels human speech: tutor, mental template, babbling, and millions of practice repetitions.
• A 2014 genome project across 48 species found over 50 genes active in both singing songbirds and speaking humans.
• Songs can be very old. A Swamp Sparrow song lineage has been passed down almost unchanged for about 1,500 years.
• Bowerbirds are described as the only animals besides humans known to use objects in elaborate displays to attract mates. They create optical illusions by placing large items at the back of the bower and small ones at the front, which makes the space look bigger.
• Some birds use plants as medicine, lining nests with herbs like yarrow, apple mint, and lavender, which may protect chicks from bacteria and parasites.
• White-crowned sparrows captured in Seattle and released about 2,300 miles away in New Jersey quickly reoriented toward their wintering grounds.
• Clark’s nutcrackers cache up to 33,000 seeds and recover them months later with about 70 percent accuracy. These birds also plant forests: nutcracker seeds they never recover can become new pines.
• The Arctic Tern makes a round trip of nearly 44,000 miles each year.
• The house sparrow spread from 16 birds introduced to Brooklyn in 1851 to every continent except Antarctica.
• The trend is that generalists gain while specialists decline.

III. Quotes

• If one of the species you’re using in your experiment fails every test you give it, the problem may be you, the researcher, not the animal. You may have failed to understand what is relevant to the way a bird sees the world.
• A narrow-minded man can lead one to devalue others, and in the end, to desperately dangerous hates of outsiders, ranging in expression from discrimination against minorities to world conflagrations,' Tolman wrote. The solution? Create broader cognitive maps in the mind that encompass bigger geographical boundaries and a wider social scope, embracing those we might consider others, and in this way encourage empathy and understanding.
• He taught me the difference between casual “birdwatching” and the more intense, focused “birding,” and urged me to go beyond identifying birds to noting their actions and behavior.
• AS A HUMAN BEING,” Einstein once wrote, “one has been endowed with just enough intelligence to be able to see clearly how utterly inadequate that intelligence is when confronted with what exists.
• Every forest has its own character, its own whispered rumors and smells.
• It’s a notion that was proposed three decades ago by Jane Goodall and her colleague Hans Kummer. The pair made a plea for measuring a wild animal’s intelligence by looking at its ability to find solutions to problems in its natural setting. What’s needed is an ecological rather than a laboratory measure of intelligence, they suggested. This can be found in an animal’s ability to innovate in its own environment, “to find a solution to a novel problem, or a novel solution to an old one.
• Words will do that. We are a naming species, and what we call things influences the way we think about them and the experiments we deem worthy of doing.
• 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.
• In some cities, you can find smoked cigarette butts in sparrow nests, which effectively function as a parasite repellent. Butts from smoked cigarettes retain large amounts of nicotine and other toxic substances, including traces of pesticides that repel all kinds of harmful creepy crawlies—an apparently ingenious new use of materials.
• MIGRATION IS ANOTHER TRADE-OFF. Birds that migrate have smaller brains than their sedentary relatives. This makes sense, as a brain that consumes a lot of energy and develops slowly would be too costly for birds that travel a lot.