“Bird Brain” Annotations & Reflection

FOR THE RECORD: I was wayyyy too lazy to go through the whole UCI VPN process outlined in the assignment instructions, so I just went straight to the Kanopy website on my regular school WiFi and selected my home campus to see if they had the same documentary in their library. As it turns out, they did, so for any future students reading this you may be able to save yourself some time.

RESEARCHERS: Christina Riehl works at Princeton University as an associate professor of Behavior and Life History Evolution, specializing in evolutionary cooperate breeding research in birds. Ludwig Huber is a zoologist from Austria leading the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna’s Unit of Comparative Cognition. Auguste von Bayern is a well known ornithologist and zoologist who studies animal (bird) cognition and learning abilities, as well as reasoning skills.

EXCERPTS:

“The ability to think flexibly is certainly a hallmark of a cognitively advanced animal, so rather than having this set response to a stimulus every time…now you’ve got a whole battery of responses that could be be put into play and now it’s a mental task to sort among which ones are best for a given situation.” - John Marzluff (21:27) Although lengthy, I felt this quote did a great job of exemplifying the oft-overlooked complexities of birds’ mental capabilities. Problem-solving and decision-making skills like those mentioned here are not qualities that can be attributed to a simple minded or “bird-brained” organism.

“Like humans, birds seem to learn new things by playing.” (22:00) This quote was a good opener for the next section of the documentary and seemed relevant to some of the topics we’ve been discussing about how animals adapt various behaviours and make the most of challenging environments.

REFLECTION

“Bird Brain” was a humbling reminder that many of the cognitive abilities seemingly reserved for higher-level primates can actually be found in other animals as well. Large amounts of research have shown that some bird species are able to make sense of object permanence, problems with multiple solutions, hierarchal rankings and even facial recognition, all pointing to greater degree of intelligence than previously accredited to them. This correlates to a larger theme within the articles for this class of researchers uncovering intricate connections both within animal minds and between them (i. e. social behavior). As an example, the documentary explains that in numerous experiments, crows were able to solve puzzles or release food from a contraption by utilizing behaviors they would not normally make use of in wild environments, attributing this ability to their societal structures. “Crows are not only good at solving problems, they’re also good at negotiating complex sets of relationships because they live in large groups. Many scientists believe that forming social relationships within big groups helps drive the intelligence of animals like chimps and dolphins.” (27:57) As Jeffrey Kluger in the TIME article “The Power of the Pack: Life in Animal Society” points out, the same holds true for many species: “Hunting and foraging is another reason to form communities. Lions are famous for the cunning way they collaborate during a hunt,. using a sort of pincer movement in which some members of the pride give chase to, say, a zebra herd, driving them into an ambush of other lions waiting in their path. Whales do something similar, creating bubble nets that confuse and effectively imprison prey. Dolphins herd fish like border collies herding sheep, forcing them into a narrower and narrower area until the fish are up to 200 times as densely grouped as they would ordinarily be.”

The NOVA documentary also shed light on some of the research methods used to study animals, including field studies and laboratory simulations. It was interesting to see how the scientists designed complicated trials specifically for their research needs and what they were trying to examine in the animal. On the contrary, the studies on emotional intelligence in the birds seemed to be deceptively simple (or were likely just presented this way in the video), such as when John Marzluff was wearing a cheap Halloween mask to give himself the appearance of a crow predator.