The Nature-Nurture-Nietzsche Newsletter

The Nature-Nurture-Nietzsche Newsletter

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The Nature-Nurture-Nietzsche Newsletter
12 Things Everyone Should Know About Birds
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12 Things Everyone Should Know About Birds

They're some of the most fascinating creatures on the planet

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Steve Stewart-Williams
Nov 02, 2024
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The Nature-Nurture-Nietzsche Newsletter
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12 Things Everyone Should Know About Birds
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This is the latest post in my “12 Things Everyone Should Know” series. You can find the full collection here.

A few years ago, the behavioral ecologist Dan Baldassarre submitted a joke science article to a predatory journal, curious to see if they’d publish it. They did. The paper was called “What’s the Deal with Birds?” and it was hilarious. Here’s the abstract:

Many people wonder: what’s the deal with birds? This is a common query. Birds are pretty weird. I mean, they have feathers. WTF? Most other animals don’t have feathers. To investigate this issue, I looked at some birds. I looked at a woodpecker, a parrot, and a penguin. They were all pretty weird! In conclusion, we may never know the deal with birds, but further study is warranted.

It was a brilliant spoof, exposing the journal’s lack of rigor. But it also got me thinking: What IS the deal with birds? In many ways, they’re quite bizarre creatures, at least by mammalian standards.

In this post, I’d like to share 12 weird and wonderful facts about our feathered friends that, in my view, every living human should know. We’ll look at how smart they are, how they survive in the wild, how they attract mates, how they risk their lives for their kids - and how some outsource their parenting to other species. Hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed putting it together!


1. Birds are dinosaurs.

I’ve known this for ages, but I still think it’s cool: Birds are dinosaurs. They’re the one group of dinosaurs that didn’t go extinct after of the asteroid 65 million years ago.

Image
Source: Brusatte (2017).

It’s not so hard to believe that birds are dinosaurs when you see this amazing creature (a shoebill).

2. Some birds are smart - really smart.

For a long time, people thought birds were, well, “bird-brained.” It turns out, however, that some birds - in particular, parrots and corvids (crows, ravens, etc.) - are extremely intelligent, with cognitive abilities rivalling those of primates. According to one fascinating paper, these abilities include “delay of gratification, mental time travel, reasoning, metacognition, mirror self-recognition, theory of mind, and third-party intervention.”

Examples of Breadth of Cognitive Skills Found in Corvids and Parrots. (A) Ravens differentiate knowers from guessers in a caching paradigm, they show third-party understanding in playback studies and they respond to inequity in working effort by refusing to accept a preferred reward (yellow dot) in exchange for an initial reward if the neighbor has received the preferred reward for free. (B) Goffin cockatoos learn tool use from a skilled demonstrator, they infer by exclusion correct solutions in a discrimination task on touchscreen computers and they wait minutes for a better reward in an exchange task. Source: Güntürkün & Bugnyar (2016).

3. Some birds understand cause and effect.

Here’s a stunning example of corvid intelligence: a New Caledonian crow figures out how to use water displacement to retrieve an out-of-reach treat. This kind of cause-and-effect understanding is rare in the animal kingdom.

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