Birds aren't birdbrains

I put a few bird feeders in my back yard this year and I've been having fun watching to see who comes. It's a great break from the hectic world. One of the things that's been really interesting to me is to learn more about bird behavior. Until fairly recently, I've considered birds to be, well, kinda stupid. You know, birdbrains.

Here are a couple of stories that show that perhaps being a birdbrain is actually a desirable trait.

First, a news item about how complex bird signals are:

Those cheery-sounding chirps coming from the tree in the back yard are carrying more than a joyful message -- they are conveying surprisingly complex information about lurking predators, biologists reported on Thursday.

Tiny chickadees, known for their scolding calls, communicate details about nearby predators, biology PhD student Chris Templeton of the University of Washington found.

For instance, the final, or "D" note in a call can be repeated for emphasis, Templeton said.

"If you ever go out and are hearing a chickadee making a really long string of "D" notes on a call -- six or eight or even 10 -- you know there is a really dangerous predator around, maybe the next-door neighbor's cat or an owl or a fox," Templeton said in a telephone interview.

"It is very strongly correlated with predator body size."

Second, this story is a few months old, but I thought it was fascinating:

Parrots can chat with humans, pigeons can tell a Picasso painting from a Monet and, in the Galapagos islands, Darwin's finches can spear insects with tools they make from cactus spines -- but, contrary to what scientists have long believed, none of them is acting merely on blind instinct or unconscious responses to training.

What those birds are doing, instead, is being smart -- displaying "complex cognitive behavior" as modern brain researchers call it. The new understanding comes from a recent series of experiments and comparative studies of the brain structures of birds, humans and other mammals.

"Evolution has created more than one way to generate complex behavior -- the mammal way and the bird way, and they're comparable to one another," said Erich Jarvis, a Duke University neurobiologist. "In fact, some birds have evolved cognitive abilities that are far more complex than many mammals."

Now, however, modern brain researchers have discovered that bird brains have large clusters of nerve cells occupying space in the brain called the pallium, and that these cell clusters are equally responsible for reasoning, learning and concentrating.

The links between the brain evolution of birds and mammals have resulted from sophisticated new studies in brain imaging, genetic analysis and laboratory experiments tracing the pathways of the central nervous systems in the two widely separated animal groups, according to the findings of the international consortium.

"We have to get rid of the idea that mammals -- and humans in particular -- are the pinnacle of evolution. We also have to understand that evolution is not linear, but an intricate branching process," Jarvis says. "We can't automatically expect to track a structure in the human brain back to other current vertebrate species."

These researchers are not quarreling with Charles Darwin's original concepts of evolution, nor are they breaking with evolution's basic tenets -- that species evolve under the pressures of natural selection.

But they do propose to modify the concept, so that the emergence of intelligent thinking birds and their brains at least take their rightful place alongside the world's mammals and are not relegated to the role of dumb creatures, all instinct and no intelligence.