Let’s Talk Bird Brain

If you take time to observe our bird companions, you will come to the same conclusion. While it works differently than the human brain, the avian brain is equally awesome and amazing.

“What kind of intelligence allows a bird to anticipate the arrival of a distant storm? Or find its way to a place it has never been before, though it may be thousands of miles away? Or precisely imitate the complex songs of hundreds of other species? Or hide tens of thousands of seeds over hundreds of square miles and remember where it put them six months later? (I would flunk these sorts of intelligence tests as readily as birds might fail mine.)”
—Jennifer Ackerman, The Genius of Birds (2016)

He. Where thou dwellest, in what grove,
Tell me Fair One, tell me Love;
Where thou thy charming nest dost build,
O thou pride of every field!
She. Yonder stands a lonely tree,
There I live and mourn for thee;
Morning drinks my silent tear,
And evening winds my sorrow bear.

He. O thou summer's harmony,
I have liv’d and mourn'd for thee;
Each day I mourn along the wood,
And night hath heard my sorrows loud.

She. Dost thou truly long for me?
And am I thus sweet to thee?
Sorrow now is at an end,
O my Lover and my Friend!

He. Come, on wings of joy we’ll fly
To where my bower hangs on high;
Come, and make thy calm retreat
Among green leaves and blossoms sweet.
—William Blake, “The Birds;” Notebook c.1800-1803 10.

Climate change is the greatest threat facing humans and also other species. In my most pessimistic days, I think it is all over for modern humans, in 100 to 200 years. It will get too hot for humans to exist. If so, if the line of homo sapiens ends in, say, 200 years, it would be true that homo sapiens had a very short run, only 200,000 years. That would definitely cast humans as having low resilience and intelligence as a species, particularly when it comes to adaptability. Ouch, that hurts, you say. No fair. Well, let’s look at the record, comparing humans to another species.

Avians, on the other hand, who evolved from the non-avian dinosaurs, survived their extinction 66 million years ago, and have existed in some form for at least 150 million years, if not earlier, perhaps going all all the way back to the dawn of dinosaurs. This is one theory. The story and the search for orgins continues. There is a lot of good scientific research in this area, on how and when dinosaurs became birds. And why birds with beaks tended to better survive the Fifth Mass Extinction.¹ Since birds have survived this long, I am betting on the birds and their superior bird brains should our Earth reach an impossible point of crisis.

Part of the reason is that I think and find birds are extraordinary beings. It is no secret that I love birds. Many people do. It is more than their ability of flight or their beauty, although I acknowledge both and have written about it in an admirable way. It is also knowing that birds can teach us humans. With their bird brains. A whole lot of important things on how to adapt and how to survive.

First of all, there are about 9,700 species of birds in the world, their numbers totalling 50 billion.² Their history of adapting to their environments is one of the many amazing and astounding facts about our avian companions.³

Jennifer Ackerman, who writes beautifully about birds, says this in her penultimate book on birds, The Bird Way (2020):

Only lately has science luminated how birds can be smart with a brain at best the size of a walnut. In 2016, a team of international scientists reported their discovery of one secret: birds pack more brain cells into a smaller space. When the team counted the number of neurons in the brains of twenty-eight different bird species ranging in size from the pint-size zebra finch to the six-foot-tall emu, they found that birds have higher neuron counts in their small brains than do mammals or even primates of similar brain size. Neurons in bird brains are much smaller, more numerous, and more densely packed than those in mammalian and primate brains. This tight arrangement of neurons makes for efficient high-speed sensory and nervous systems. In other words, say the researchers, bird brains have the potential to provide much higher cognitive clout per pound than do mammalian brains.

Birds have powerful brains, you see, and it is not a matter of brain size, but the amount of neurons birds carry in their heads. Arya just flew to me and landed on my left shoulder and whispered in my ear (some timely.squawks of love) that he is glad that I recognize his intelligence. “I always have, Arya. I always have, my lovely Avian Companion.”

And now to the final part of this essay. Life is full of contradictions, including that we can sort it all out with our intellect with pure reason, which itself does not exist. We understand less by reasoning, chiefly because we humans lie to ourselves. And to others. Often.

Lying leads to a million untruths. There are no innocent lies. Each lie places us further from reality, each lie places us further from Nature.

To understand, I observe the birds, as I do daily. The birds never lie (Neither does any animal, except humans). They are incapable of it. But birds do find ways to trick predators which is deception with a purpose, often survival.⁴ Truth be told, and there is a lot of truth to be told, birds teach me a lot. If you want to learn about the world, watch the birds. I watch how the birds communicate with the squirrels when I am out early morning laying down nuts and seeds.

Their communication is beyond ours; their comprehension beyond ours; their understanding beyond ours. If you take time to observe the birds, you will come to the same conclusion. The brain of a bird is awesome and amazing. If you want to find out and know, make friends with a bird. It will take time to build trust, often years. But when you do, you will have a loyal companion. And an intelligent one, too.

I will end with a video of the fastest bird, in fact, the fastest animal on our Earth, the Peregrine Falcon (Falco peregrinus). This video from National Geographic looks at how fast these Beaked Avians can fly, particularly in a hunting dive. The answer is astounding; the video amazing to watch.

Merci et à bientôt
Born at 315 ppm
Now at 425 ppm

1. Smithsonian Magazine: By the end of the Cretaceous, beaked birds were already eating a much more varied diet than their toothed relatives. These birds weren’t specialized on insects or other animal food, and so they were able to pluck up hard food items like seeds and nuts. And in the aftermath of the extinction, when animal life was severely cut back, those hard, persistent little morsels got beaked birds through the hard times. Beaked birds were able to feed on the seeds of the destroyed forests and wait out the decades until vegetation began to return.

2. PNAS: Here, we integrate data from a suite of well-studied species with a global dataset of bird occurrences throughout the world—for 9,700 species (∼92% of all extant species)—and use missing data theory to estimate species-specific abundances with associated uncertainty. We find strong evidence that the distribution of species abundances is log left skewed: there are many rare species and comparatively few common species. By aggregating the species-level estimates, we find that there are ∼50 billion individual birds in the world at present.

3. PBS: The power of flight gave birds the edge over most other creatures. They could travel further and wider in search of food, and live where no other creature could go. Millions of years of evolution have adapted each bird species to fit into its own little niche and pre-programmed it to feed, to migrate, to nest and breed in its own particular place and manner.

Birds have adapted so well to the demands of and trials set by our planet that Sir David Attenborough believes they may be the most successful creatures on earth, more successful even than insects.

4. Ackerman: “The bird world is rife with bluffs, masquerades, shams, and shell games. Some parent birds, such as piping plovers, feign a broken wing to draw predators away from the nest, fluttering erratically and making convulsive attempts to run, jump, or fly. Other birds distract predators by running in a crouched position like a small rodent. Still others, such as quail, feign death to fool their pursuers.”