Bird Brains
What a fascinating world! “Bird brain” is meant to be an insult. The more we learn about bird brains, the more it looks like a compliment. Consider this: In an article in Science News Online, Susan Milius says
Should humanity get a little too full of itself and its intellectual prowess, there’s always Clark’s nutcracker to think about. This pale-gray bird with black wings and a long beak flits through woodlands in the West, collecting seeds during times of plenty and tucking them away for a hungry winter’s day. During a year, each bird buries 22,000 to 33,000 seeds in up to 2,500 locations, and scientists estimate that the bird recovers two-thirds of them up to 13 months later.
How do you think you’d do on this “bird brain” test? On the other hand, those latter-day dinosaurs who share our back yards with us are notably poor mathematicians (they probably count to around three or four). Each species develops the brain it needs for the evolutionary path it has followed – for the niche it occupies.