Think ‘Birdbrain’ Is an Insult? Think Again.

HUNTING AND NAVIGATING. Ellie, a northern goshawk owned by Lloyd and Rose Buck in England, tucks in her wings and streaks through narrow openings at high speed. Aeronautics scientists say the fierce predators assess the density of the trees and intuit how fast they can fly—ensuring that they’ll find openings and not crash.

Picture of a northern goshawk tucking in it's wings streaks through narrow openings at high speed

HUNTING AND NAVIGATING. Ellie, a northern goshawk owned by Lloyd and Rose Buck in England, tucks in her wings and streaks through narrow openings at high speed. Aeronautics scientists say the fierce predators assess the density of the trees and intuit how fast they can fly—ensuring that they’ll find openings and not crash.
By Virginia Morell
Photographs by Charlie Hamilton James
This story appears in the February 2018 issue of National Geographic magazine.
The American crows in Gabriella Mann’s Seattle Neighborhood love her, and the eight-year-old girl has the goods to prove it. She places a plastic jewelry box on a kitchen counter and lifts the lid.

A crow photographed at George Miksch Sutton Avian Research Center, Bartlesville, Oklahoma
PHOTOGRAPH BY JOEL SARTORE
Each small compartment holds a treasure, a gift, that the crows have given her: a gold bead, a pearl earring, a screw, a red Lego piece, colored and clear glass chips, a chicken bone, a pebble, a quartz crystal, and many more.

Though slightly soiled, all are stored as carefully as rare artifacts, dated, and categorized. Gabi selects two that she calls her First Favorites, and holds them up for me to admire. One is a pearly-pink heart charm, the other a tiny, silver rectangle with the word “BEST” engraved on one side. “It’s because they love me,” she says about the seemingly thoughtful objects, adding that she expects the birds will leave her a “FRIEND” charm one day. “They know everything I like—toys and shiny things—because they watch me. They’re like spies.”

Already that morning a crow—likely one Gabi’s brother named Babyface, who has a recognizable patch of gray feathers—has brought her a dead stickleback fish, placing it where it couldn’t be missed: on the stairs leading to the family’s backyard. “This is the second dead fish they’ve brought me. I don’t know why,” Gabi says as she tucks the stickleback’s silvery remains in a plastic bag, affixes a dated label, and places the bag in the freezer. “They aren’t my favorites. But this one’s in better shape; the other one had its head cut off.” Babyface also once left her the head of a baby bird. “Kind of gross.” He brought a different—and from Gabi’s viewpoint, more appropriate—gift that afternoon. She and her brother had dashed to the backyard to replenish the bird feeders. She filled one tray with peanuts in the shell and another with dog food. Two crows flew into the conifers. One was Babyface, and he was holding an orange object in his beak. He moved to an overhead cable, perched above Gabi, and dropped the item so that it landed right at her feet. “Look! A toy!” she cried, scooping up a miniature rubber squid and spinning with joy—a dance Babyface watched from his perch. “See, he knows exactly what I like.”

OFFERING GIFTS. Young Gabi Mann befriended crows in her Seattle neighborhood, setting out nuts and dog food. In exchange they brought her gifts, including a pearlescent plastic heart, one of her favorites.

Are the crows actually doing what humans do, bringing gifts to a friend because she’s been kind to them? Can a crow—or any bird—make decisions of this sort? Researchers studying crows, ravens, and other corvids (the family of songbirds that includes crows, jays, rooks, magpies, and others) say yes. Indeed the similarities among humans, other primates, and these birds have riveted scientists studying the origin of our—and other animals’—intellectual abilities. “Birds took a different evolutionary path from mammals but have arrived at seemingly similar cognitive solutions,” says Nathan Emery, a cognitive biologist at Queen Mary University, London, “so they offer a rare opportunity to understand what evolutionary pressures lead to certain mental skills.”

Even so, until this century most scientists would have scoffed at the notion of a choosy, generous crow because crows and all birds (and most mammals) were thought to be robotic simpletons, capable only of reacting instinctively to things that happened to them. Birds were dismissed as “birdbrains” even before the scientist Ludwig Edinger misinterpreted their neural anatomy, around 1900. He thought birds lacked a neocortex, the thinking area in the mammalian brain where much of our higher cognitive functioning—working memory, planning, and problem solving—occurs.

Despite this supposed mental deficit, birds were used throughout the 20th century by comparative psychologists in their animal cognition studies. They particularly favored common pigeons, whose brains are just about the size of a shelled peanut, and canaries and zebra finches, whose brains are even smaller. Pigeons, scientists discovered, have impressive memories, with an uncanny ability to distinguish human faces and expressions, letters of the alphabet, even paintings by Monet and Picasso. Other researchers revealed the remarkable memories of Clark’s nutcrackers, scrub jays, and chickadees. Nutcrackers, for example, harvest and cache more than 30,000 pine seeds every autumn, distributing them in several thousand tiny caches they need to remember through the winter.

source: https://www.nationalgeographic.com