https://www.jenniferackermanauthor.com/the-bird-way
Also, just my opinion, but Kea's are the best bird there is.
This fits right into the ABC model of parrot psychology:
https://www.parrots.org/pdfs/all_about_parrots/reference_lib...
Research has shown brain size matters but not that much, we should look at relative brain size.
One of my all time favourite short stories, with or without intelligent parrots.
Time for me to read it again. This is the Arecibo story, don't miss if you haven't read it before.
"You be good".
Strangely enough, was having a lot of difficulty coaxing google to fetch this link.
They have interesting interactions with the hooded crows, tolerant of each other but still competitive over food. If a white tailed eagle enters they area they will together team up and attempt to chase it away.
They have complex social interactions with each. I've seen a younger magpie in a group get pinned down by a dominant one while several in the group pecked at its belly, because it ate out of order. They acknowledge even me, their neighbor, who occasionally leaves some winter food out for them.
Anyone who is fortunate to spend real time in or at the edge of nature, and takes the time to observe, should be humbled by the complexity and intelligence of the world around us. Some species stand out, of course, like the magpies.
Most of what we have created as the human race is best characterized as complication rather than complexity, when compared to the utter complexity of the natural world. In the era of AI I find it amusing that we believe we're approaching being able to construct a kind of real intelligence when so many can barely recognize, let alone understand, the "lesser" forms of intelligence around us.
I imagine an alternate world filled only with intelligent robots that are trying to create "biological-agi" from scratch and are supremely frustrated at the results, throwing neuron count and density at the problem without understanding the fundamental properties that actually create intelligence.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n...
https://www.nature.com/news/2007/070716/full/news070716-15.h...
> Scans reveal a fluid-filled cavity in the brain of a normal man.
Well no. Some birds are flat-out dumb. Chickens for example.
What is it made out of? meTUL
Want a pistach
The author takes forgranted the claim of intelligence; and does not assess at all whether the researcher simply said those words to the parrot every night. (Why not? It sounds exactly like what a researcher would tell a parrot before turning off the lights.) A quick search on Wikipedia says the parrot was also found dead in the morning, not in the implied "parrot has last words" scenario.
My conure is extremely intelligent at times, learning a trick at the second try or doing what I ask him immediately. Most of the time, though, he understands but decides to just ignore me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test#Insects
When it first came out I don't think anyone quite knew what to make of that, and I'm not sure anything's changed since.
What do you mean by this? Surely this applies to humans too, we are animals after all. So what distinction did you intend to make?
I recalled (once I was reminded of the author) that I read this originally in one of his Anthologies. I strongly recommend to everyone who likes reading and thinking to buy both of his books!
https://thehumaneleague.org/article/are-chickens-smart https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5306232/
Maybe they never try to cross roads?
We have some feral colonies set up in places like Miami and San Francisco, but not all species thrive in warm locations.
That said, my palm sized green cheek conure is rarely in his extremely large cage (it's 4 by 4 feet). Door is always open unless he's sleeping or we're out of the house. Usually he's with me on my shoulder when I'm working during the day and gives his "2 cents" when I'm in meetings.
Most parrots kept as pets prefer it locked for security reasons. He'll get anxious if it's not when he's trying to sleep.
I've seen a lot of terrible bird owners, but I also know plenty that enrich their bird's lives. My little conure has a surprisingly extensive vocabulary for a species not known for speaking.
He says "poo" when when he has to poop, "what's up?" when he greets anyone, "whatcha doing", "<his name>", "yeah!" (mimicking Little Jon), "stop" (when he doesn't like what we're doing), "good boy", "Love you" and a few others I can't recall off the top of my head.
He knows when we are leaving him when we say goodbye - the garage door opening - the car - the gate opening and closing.
During the day he sits in the home office with me and my office days he is around my daughter.
Most of the time he sits on the top or the side of the cage perching on wooden sticks.
Occasionally he will dismount if the gardening services are busy making a racket with the weed whacker and will walk to the bathroom and climb to the top of the shower.
The one cage is close to an outside gate so he will climb on the window or the gate itself during summer.
We also have 3 cats, but he just walks past them, and he talks and even scolds them in my voice.
I'm convinced that people that keep (uninjured) birds in cages are narcissistic sociopaths. This is based on the conversations that I've had with them about it. Life's too short to deal with people like that. I'm thankful for the indicator to avoid them, but I'm sad that it's at the expense of a bird.
Otherwise they would barely be able to eat or drink; their stomachs are far larger and can be far heavier than their brains.
Why would inertia need to be optimized? Think a little bit.
Its part of their calling social members wiring....
I've thought about getting a pet turtle or tortoise [1] because they are my favorite animal, but I found out that in order for them to be happy and healthy they need a lot more room than I could easily fit in my house. Either a very large aquarium or a very large area for them to walk around depending on the species, neither of which I can easily have in my house.
And I think a lot of animals are like that. Ultimately a lot of these animals evolved in areas that really aren't that "confined" in any meaningful sense, and forcing confines seems kind of cruel.
[1] To be clear, ethically, not one of those shady endangered black market things that you can find.
Not saying there isn't and somewhat offtopic, but if you apply this to LLMs those are much, much 'smarter' than all the animals people like to call intelligent (or something similar). If you disagree, please tell me for which task requiring intelligence you'd rather have an animal's wit than that of an LLM.
I really do feel we should be taking the current state of affairs as a starting point to recalibrate what counts as smart or worth 'protecting', whether it's our beloved animal friends or something inorganic. Simultaneously believing "birds are super smart" and "LLMs are just stochastic parrots" seems absurd.
There’s something intrinsic to the structure of brains that seems to pre-encode a lot of evolutionarily useful content without a training phase.
I’d love to take a course on just this topic and what do we know about it.
Now I wonder if the decentralized organization / hub and spoke model octopi alone exhibit offers some advantage when it comes to problem-solving
In the mountains around Trondheim, Norway, you run into free range chicken farms (and sheep roaming the mountain top). Signs warn you that chickens are about and I think them getting hit is a real concern if you are maximizing chicken freedom.
That said, these aren't busy roads. The more traffic, the more barriers to keep the animals from getting hit.
This means that for a given unit of time, shorter reproduction cycles and more offspring results in faster adaptation which is what OP meant and what the unhelpful pedantry doesn’t describe.
> "I don't care how you define intelligence -- that one's hard to brush off."
If your audience conceived it as possibly being a merely repeated phrase that the researcher probably said thousands of times, not something the parrot actually understood, then it is very easy to brush off as something we already knew parrots could do.
I was doomscrolling Reddit at 1am (as you do) and someone had posted a video from the New Zealand Transport Agency. Road workers near a tunnel by Milford Sound kept finding their traffic cones in weird places. Dragged into the road, rearranged, sometimes actively rerouting traffic. Nobody could figure out what was going on, so they checked the cameras.
Kea. Native to New Zealand, these big parrots are usually seen on the route to Milford Sound harassing tourists. A flock of them is officially called a "circus" or a "curiosity" -- whoever named them clearly met one. The footage showed them just... casually shoving cones around a construction site. But here's the insane bit -- workers said the kea would listen for cars coming through the tunnel BEFORE moving the cones, timing it so the cars would have to stop. Why? Because stopped cars mean humans getting out. Humans getting out means food.
These birds are smarter than some adults I know. Move cone → car stops → human gets out → human feeds me. They independently invented toll booths.
The transport agency's solution was equally funny. They switched to heavier cones the birds couldn't move, and then -- I'm not making this up -- they built "kea gyms" by the roadside. Puzzle stations and contraptions to keep them entertained. A government agency literally built a playground for parrots because they were too smart for traffic management. Honestly, I'm fine with my tax dollars going to this.
Obviously now I had to know -- is this the smartest bird in the world? And hold on, how do you actually measure how smart a bird is? So I whipped out ChatGPT and Google Scholar and here's what I learned.
Turns out there's no single test -- researchers have come up with a bunch of different experiments over the years, each designed to measure a different type of intelligence. Some of these I'd fail too tbh.
First up, the mirror test. You stick a coloured mark on a bird somewhere it can only see in a mirror. If it looks at the mirror and then tries to remove the mark from its own body, it recognises that the reflection is itself. That's self-awareness. Most animals completely fail this -- dogs fail it, cats fail it. Eurasian magpies pass it. One of the very few non-mammals to do so. Your local magpie has a stronger sense of self than your golden retriever. Pretty humbling for the dog.
Then there's a cool one called Aesop's Fable -- my favourite. It's literally named after the fable where a thirsty crow drops stones into a pitcher to raise the water level. Researchers put food floating in a narrow tube of water that the bird can't reach. The question is whether it'll figure out to drop objects in to raise the water level and get the food. Rooks, New Caledonian crows, and Eurasian jays all pass. Some of them even figure out that heavy objects sink (useful) whilst light objects float (useless). A fable from 600 BC and it turns out Aesop was just reporting the news.
Next, the delayed gratification test. The marshmallow test, but for birds. Offer an OK snack now, or a much better snack if they wait. Ravens pick the better future reward over 70% of the time. They'll even choose a tool they'll need later over an immediate food reward. That's more self-control than I have around a bowl of chips.
There's also vocal mimicry and communication, which goes way beyond "Polly wants a cracker." Dr. Irene Pepperberg studied an African grey parrot named Alex for 30 years. Alex could identify objects, colours, shapes, and numbers. He understood abstract concepts like "same" and "different." His vocabulary exceeded 100 words. When he died in 2007, his last words to Pepperberg were reportedly "You be good. I love you. See you tomorrow." I don't care how you define intelligence -- that one's hard to brush off.
And finally, spatial memory. Clark's nutcrackers cache up to 33,000 seeds across thousands of locations each autumn -- and remember where most of them are months later. I lose my keys in a two-bedroom apartment.
Here's the wild part. A 2016 study in PNAS found that parrots and songbirds pack roughly twice as many neurons into their forebrains as primate brains of the same mass. The neurons are just much smaller and more densely packed. A crow's brain weighs about 10 grams. A chimpanzee's weighs about 400 grams. And yet corvids demonstrate cognitive abilities that rival great apes: tool use, planning, and social reasoning.
Forebrain neurons vs. brain weight
Show humans
0g50g100g200g300g400gBrain weight01.0B2.0B3.0B4.0B5.0B6.0B7.0BForebrain neuronsMammal trendBird trendMouseCatCorgiMacaqueBorder CollieChimpanzeePigeonRavenMacaw
Orange = birds, grey = mammals. Dashed lines show trend. Birds sit far above the mammal curve.
A macaw's brain weighs 20 grams and has roughly the same number of forebrain neurons as a macaque monkey's brain at 70 grams. Ounce for ounce, bird brains are some of the most computationally dense organs in the animal kingdom. Calling someone a "bird brain" is honestly more of a compliment.
There's no definitive answer because different species dominate different areas. But after going through all of this, if you made me rank them, I'd probably go:
Evil genius tier: Corvids (crows, ravens, magpies, jays). The tool users. New Caledonian crows are probably the standout -- they craft hooks from sticks to pull grubs out of crevices, something we thought only primates could do. Ravens plan for the future. Magpies recognise themselves in mirrors. Jays hide food and then re-hide it if they think another bird was watching. That last one is wild -- it means they can model what another bird knows. They're paranoid in a way that requires theory of mind.
Con artist tier: Parrots (African greys, kea, cockatoos). The communicators and schemers. Alex the African grey is the poster child, but kea might be the most broadly impressive. A University of Auckland study found kea can judge statistical probabilities -- something previously demonstrated only in human infants and great apes. In other tests at Canterbury University, kea outscored gibbons. Actual primates. Goffin's cockatoos can unlock a sequence of five different locks in the right order to reach a reward. Each lock has a different mechanism. Worthwhile contenders for a spot in Ocean's Fourteen if they ever make one.
Quietly competent tier: Songbirds. Clark's nutcrackers, chickadees, and a handful of others. They won't pick your locks or craft tools, but they'll memorise 33,000 seed locations and find them nine months later under snow. The accountants of the bird world.
Honestly, corvids and parrots are neck and neck. Corvids edge ahead on tool use and physical problem solving. Parrots are ahead on communication and social cognition. Both would absolutely destroy your average pigeon in a pub quiz.
I also had to look up the dumbest bird. You might guess it's a turkey -- and they do have a reputation for being dim, mostly because domestic turkeys have been selectively bred to be so heavy they can't fly and so docile they just stand around. Wild turkeys are actually pretty sharp. But no, the real answer is the kakapo -- which is also a New Zealand parrot, funnily enough. The kakapo evolved with no natural predators, so when it encounters a threat it just... freezes. Stands completely still and hopes for the best. The males also have a mating call so confusing that the females often can't figure out where the sound is coming from. Between that and the freezing thing, there are fewer than 200 left. The kea got all the brains in the New Zealand parrot family.
We default to thinking intelligence scales with brain size, that it's a mammal thing, that it correlates with being "higher" on some imaginary evolutionary ladder. Turns out it's about neuron density and architecture, not mass. A 10 gram raven brain running 1.2 billion neurons is doing more per gram than almost anything else in nature.
Anyway. Next time someone calls you a bird brain, just say thank you.
Disclaimer: Thoughts are my own and do not represent any other parties.
But I did not want a summary (why massacre such a beautiful story *), and neither the later links (pretty bad visual presentation of the story), but the Nautilus link in particular.
I think that's where I had read it first on the web, by far the best layout compared to the other links.
Even a few years ago the Nautilus link used to be the canonical (first) result.
* If I want Michelangelo's David summarised, I think I would mention 'summary' explicitly.
With humans, performance in one cognitive test correlates with another and so on, generally. So, intelligence across domains.
Researchers test the same with animals. The issue being animals' intelligence being tied to their ecology. The dilemma being what is it worth for an animal solving a task that has no significance in its life. The other argument being if the animals' intelligence is closer/similar to human intelligence, we will find similar results in both.
Your hypothesis has therefore been peer-reviewed.
> This means that for a given unit of time, shorter reproduction cycles and more offspring results in faster adaptation which is what OP meant and what the unhelpful pedantry doesn’t describe.
There's no indication that this is what the OP meant. If the OP meant that, they'd be saying that birds evolved faster, not that they had an ancestor that evolved a very long time ago, which is a meaningless statement.
I agree one should interpret what people say charitably, but there's a difference between that and just pretending that someone made a totally different claim in order to make a nonsense statement seem less silly.
If birds and primates today belong to equally long evolutionary lineages, then they have both had the same amount of time to adapt.
Now, speciation is what makes things interesting, because species diversify the subjects of adaptation. So, if we say some bird species has been around for longer than the human species, then you can say that that bird species has been subjected to adaptation pressures for longer (though this, too, is too simplistic; adaptation pressures are not uniformly distributed).
This, of course, starts getting into philosophical questions about the notion of "species". Modern biology has a poor grasp of what it means to be a species. The biological literature alone contains about 20 different operating definitions. To reconcile evolution with the notion of species, some have argued that all or almost all living things belong to a single species, but we're actually seeing a resurgence of functionalist/teleological notions in biology today, because it turns out you cannot explain or classify living things without such notions.
Navigating your way to a location without colliding with anything. Finding food in the woods. Such stuff that animals can do that we yet have AI be able to do.
"Simplicity Is The Ultimate Sophistication" was likely not uttered by Leonardo Da Vinci, but it’s still a pretty cool expression. Anyway, architecture matters.
[1] https://checkyourfact.com/2019/07/19/fact-check-leonardo-da-...
Totally agree on more rare/exotic animals though - they shouldn't be subject to unnatural conditions like this.
Now, putting a dog in an apartment, especially when you're unable to give them constant exercise and attention. That's bordering on cruel.
That all being said, every animal has it's own personality. So it's best to match them with an environment that fits their personal needs.
And that doesn’t make any sense, unless there really is no configuration necessary
octopi bucking that trend is an example we need
And are Octopi really better at problem-solving than a dog in general?
It continually learns from the real world, as more and more neurons accumulate.
This layered learning may be an advantage in terms of compact representations.
No doubt, the human fetus brain learns much earlier than birth, or even from emergence of first neurons. But it isn't learning from the environment directly, or making survival critical choices, from first neural emergence.
--
Another octopus advantage maybe that it has relatively independent "brains" behind each eye, and along each leg. The distribution of brain in a way that reflects its physical distribution, might offer optimizations too.
We know humans benefit from partially independent spinal cord activity. This is suggestive evidence that the distributed intelligence of an octopus may be an advantage.
--
For exhibited intelligence per time, no other creature including humans comes anywhere close. They even learn "theory of mind", i.e. the ability to model other creatures situational awareness, ability to perceive, and likely responses to different situations.
To learn all that, without any mentoring or social examples, in the order of a year, along with their exotic body plan and amazing sensory configurations, would make the octopus a wildly implausible science fiction invention, if we didn't actually happen to have them living successfully in astonishing numbers, and pervasively in essentially all ocean environments.
It may have been enormous luck for us, that they live in an environment where technological progression would be very challenging.
The octopus is a very strong candidate for "smarter than humans", as an individual. If we equalize age, it isn't even a contest. If we normalize for lifespan, but equalize for lack of social mentorship, I expect they win decisively again.
(We often forget how much of our survival and progress is predicated on not being individuals. We have a species intelligence that is much higher than our individual intelligence. Since we as individuals gain so much from what is passed to us, we imagine that we would naturally know countless basic things, that if we actually grew up with people who did not know those things, would be far out of reach. Having people around to teach us things, allowed us evolve to be mentally lazy! Shades of current tool/dependency issues. The octopus has never had a crutch.)
--
There is no credible estimate of how many octopus individuals inhabit our oceans. But the number is in the billions at a minimum. Including young, it may be tens of billions or more.
That doesn't mean language ability is a natural outcome of crossing a certain threshold of brain complexity; if anything it's more likely the other way around: this complexity being be driven by highly social behavior and communication.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n...
Common misconception. Parrots are much more than just mimicry machines. There is also Apollo the parrot that shows this in detail and following from Irene's research with Alex
Parrots can't speak fluent English, which shouldn't be surprising. Last I checked, no human is fluent in Parrot or Dolphin.
Though, at least one parrot may have demonstrated an ability to understand language at more than a surface level.
Birds have areas of the brain that we would consider language alike. Both for native bird communication and I would also speculate that for human to bird communication.
If you have ever owned a parrot this is blatantly obvious since they actively communicate and vocalize both observations and needs/desires
(I'm personally uncomfortable with birds being caged for long periods or in confined spaces, and I'm not offering the above as a justification. I don't own or live with any animals.)
One day Seven of Nine might be eaten by a raccoon but I’ve seen the GoPro footage, she has a blast every day of her life. As a side-effect benefit, she doesn’t play games with me because her entire world is filled with games she can play herself. We still sleep curled up together though :)
Now, even if we leave our doors open he prefers to stay inside the house with his little brother Vicente, another cat we adopted. We regularly make new toys and play with them.
Vicente has been with us since he was around 1 month old (now 6 months old) so he's way more curious about the outside. We are preparing to start walking them out though I have a feeling we will have to drag Ramón out of the house.
I wouldn't feel bad for confining your cats to your house! They are probably very happy :)
They’ll have heard noises, experienced gyroscopic forces and gravity. But a calf being born and standing up within minutes to an hour is pretty neat. Same with vision, going from no sensory input to seeing.
Apparently piglets have full motor control in 8 hours after birth.
As I said, I would love to have the time and go back to school to learn way more about all of this. Nature and evolution are pretty amazing.
https://petapixel.com/2026/03/24/wildlife-photographer-of-th...
Then further down the page, "A sika deer carries the interlocked severed head of a rival male that had died after their battle". Nature, eh.
It's no worse than inserting greek words (octopodes) into English language.
One of our cats has arthritis and before we got her treatment she didn’t like them, but she’s perfectly happy now.
And how do you objectively come to this conclusion? Could you say a human prisoner can learn to cope in a prison and present "psychologically" well, but it still feel like a form of torture?
It may be due to myelin[1], or rather lack of it. Neurons pass signals along axons as a wave of an action potential[2]. It is a process involving moving ions through the cell membrane to change local deviations of electrical charge and it goes like a wave. The wave is pretty slow. It can be sped up by making axons thicker, and IIRC octopuses has some wildly thick axons you can see without a microscope.
Vertebrates learned how to create an myelin isolation on axons with small gaps, so ion exchanges happen only at these gaps, and between them there is other mechanism to transfer charges, I think it is just "normal" electric current in electrolyte. It is much faster. I'd bet that the slowness of octopuses is not due to neuron count, but due to outmoded axons.
Pretty sure cats love climbing things, and stairs are no different.
My indoor-outdoor cat only catches small animals if they run between her paws. But she did chase a rather large raccoon around the house once, as I did.
In my suburban neighborhood, we occasionally have coyotes. They are known to prey on fat cats (the feline kind).
My feeling is that predation by domesticated outdoor cats is overblown.
I also feel that small wild cats were likely native everywhere. Birds were probably not their primary prey; small reptiles and mammals, i.e. animals that don't fly, nest in trees, or live in flocks.
Unfortunately they can't parent, as both parents die directly after reproduction. But octopus can learn from observing, so some kind of mentoring or modeling between individuals could be encouraged or arranged.
And perhaps animatronic or video animations could contribute? If it turned out octopus could learn from video, the potential experiments would be unlimited. Most of an octopus eye's field of vision, maybe all, is monocular.
One of my dreams is to have an octopus reserve and a parrot reserve. And breed and create situational and living contexts for both species, where both individual and social intelligences are brought to the surface and encouraged to flourish.
I view those two animals as the most and 2nd-most (peak, for their separating phylums/classes) alien intelligences on Earth. The octopus intelligence is a true alien from a functional perspective, in that our common ancestor only had a rudimentary nervous system. A bilateral marine worm, 600 mya.
Our common ancestor with parrots would be something like the Hylonomus, 320 mya. something like a primitive gecko.
The differences in managing the two species would be extreme. Water, air. Hermit vs. tight knit social bents. Extremely short generations vs. very long ones.
But both are highly curious and actively engage and bond with people, other creatures and artifacts they find interesting.
Short octopus lives would ironically, be an exceptional boon for breeding longevity. Not only would changes be very apparent quickly, but the short lifecycle makes breeding vast numbers, to implement a broad gene/morph search, relatively inexpensive.
We have 94 parrot genomes [0], and at least one octopus genome. [1] Octopus genes are as trippy as everything else about them.
My guess is with both creatures, a significant intelligence uptick could happen very quickly simply by mining their current very high diversity of genes, across large populations and numbers of sub-species. They are both ideal creatures in that respect.
The west side of Hawaii's Big Island had both an octopus lab and a parrot reserve. The reserve is still there. I was able to visit the lab twice before it was shut down.
[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36405343/
[1] https://scienceandculture.com/2023/02/geneticists-puzzled-by...
This just seems obvious to me, but I've been around animals my entire life.
I’ll throw it back at you, maybe if you left that meeting you would find that it had less consequences than you are imagining.