NATIONAL
Not necessarily all that birdbrained
By LEE BOWMAN
Scripps Howard News Service
February 14, 2002BOSTON - OK, so there's the owl, the Roadrunner and Tweety. But that pretty much exhausts the list when it comes to popular notions of wily avians.
For most people, "birdbrain'' means ditzy, flighty, even irrational behavior.
But biologists and neuroscientists gathered here know better. Research being formally presented Friday, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, describes feats of feathery cognition that can rival or surpass that of humans.
When it comes to communicating, navigating and certain types of memory, "most birds are a lot smarter than most people give them credit for,'' said Alan Kamil, a professor of biological science at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln.
Songbirds can remember, and repeat, up to 2,000 different songs.
Birds remember where they stash thousands of seeds each fall, and how to navigate their way back to their caches.
And some birds even seem to be capable of a certain amount of logical reasoning.
Consider Griffin, a parrot who lives in the lab of Irene Pepperberg, a research professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Brandeis University. He's recently begun to stack objects like bottle caps and lids in specific order, and is doing the same thing with verbal labels, uttering phrases like "green birdie'' and "want more nuts.''
"And if you try to give him a banana or a toy instead, he emphatically repeats that he wants a nut,'' said Pepperberg. This sort of behavior was once thought to be exclusive to monkeys, great apes - and humans.
"The fact that we are finding this in animals so far removed from primates is exciting,'' Pepperberg said.
Children begin to put words and objects into order at about the same time in the developmental process - roughly a year old. Scientists think that a language-related region of the brain, called "Broca's area,'' controls both of those abilities during the earliest stages of development.
Birds don't have a Broca's area, but it appears the brain equipment needed to make ordered word and object patterns isn't unique to humans and our primate cousins, Pepperberg said. It may be that such machinery evolved separately in birds and primates, or it may have arisen in an ancient ancestor common to both groups and perhaps other groups of animals.
Birds also use rule-governed behavior with songs, with young songbirds, parrots and hummingbirds having to master and memorize a complex repertoire from parents or neighbors.
"The special abilities that many songbirds have, just like we have, relate to the ability to learn a vocal communication system. But our closest living relatives, the non-human primates, can't do this,'' said Donald Kroodsma, a researcher at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. "So why can an animal with a brain the size of a walnut do it so well when bigger primate brains can't is one of the big mysteries of animal communications." (Bob's Note: Not nearly as big as a walnut actually. More like the size of a peanut. I've seen avian brains during dissections and spent a great deal of time handling birds as a boy at the Catalina Island Bird Park before it closed.)
Birds also excel at finding their way, migrating across continents and able to remember numerous landmarks.
Kamil has found that birds like the Clark's nutcracker use multiple landmarks to find in the spring the seeds they stashed in the fall. A single bird can hide between 20,000 and 25,000 seeds in up to 6,000 different locations each fall, yet manage to find most of them again even months later. The birds seem to work from point to point, but also use a third landmark, perhaps to correct for error in the birds' internal compass.
On the Net: http://www.aaas.org
(Reach Lee Bowman
at bowmanl(at)shns.com)
The E.W. Scripps Co.
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