Birds are smart…

Both Boing Boing and Making Light are pointing to a Science article discussing tool using crows.

The article is interesting, but not particularly ground breaking.

Both Boing Boing and Making Light are pointing to a Science article discussing tool using crows.

The article is interesting, but not particularly ground breaking. There’s a huge literature on this, most of which hasn’t really been given much public attention. A good starting point is the book The Human Nature of Birds: A Scientific Discovery With Startling Implications. Hell, if you read Darwin, he had some of this figured out…

The avian brain is wired different than many animals. Everyone’s heard of Koko the gorilla and the language experiments done with gorillas and other great apes. Fascinating stuff.

But few people have her of Irene Pepperberg’s research with Alex the African Grey and other African Grey’s.

Alex has a vocabulary of over 200 words, and can consistently take words and build cognitive groupings out of them. Some of the stuff they’ve done with Alex is here.

Laurie and I have kept birds for what seems forever — about 20 years now, first with Morgan, and after she died, Tatiana, our current Umbrella Cockatoo.

First surprise is that birds (IMHO) have the same attitude as cats. Dogs see you as friends, cats see you as servants. Birds remind me a lot of cats.

Tatiana is an avian equivalent of a four year old. She’s old enough to know that certain actions will get her in trouble, and old enough to decide it’s worth it and do it anyway. This creates a problem, since she firmly believes she’s in charge, and she’s not afraid to let us know if we’ll allow it — and she knows she’s in charge of the cats, because they know it, too. So we have this frigging bird chasing cats — and laughing — because she knows she can get away with it (and we have a smart cat, too. Smart enough to know never to touch the bird when we’re around, and willing to wait for the time when we aren’t — the family is never together unsupervised. never)

Morgan, bless her soul, was an escape artist. we finally had to padlock her cage, because anything less than that, she could open. We caught her one day stuffing splinters up the keyhole of the padlock, becaue she’d figured out that when you put the key in there, it opened. We fully expected her to invent lockpicks at any time, but instead, she chose to disassemble her cage from the inside instead, and kept finding places where she could remove a piece or split a seam instead. She was a big believer in brute force.

Tatiana, on the other hand, is more of an engineer. I’ve caught her watching me do things — for instance, using a D ring to attach toys to her cage (a D ring looks like a link of chain, but one side is threaded so you can open it and then screw it shut again). Not suprisingly, I came home one day, and all of her toys were on the floor of the cage, and she had one of those D rings in one claw, and was very carefully screwing it open, and then closed, and watching what it did as she turned it.

We’re constantly reminded just how sharp she is. She remembers things. She can tell time. She understands the difference between weekend and weekday. She knows if I’m working from home, it’s not “her” time until after 4:30. And she knows when 4:30 is.

It’s never boring here. Just the way we like it, when we aren’t considering killing her.

here’s tonight’s fun and games. I’m home late from work. As I hit the driveway, the door pops open, and laurie yells “I need you in here now!”. That’s never a good sign. Laurie’s blouse is covered with blood spots.

Normally, that means a cracked blood feather, which is either simple to deal with, or potentially fatal — and Tatiana’s in another moult phase, so she’s primed. But tonight, it was a cracked toenail.

So suddenly, Laurie is sitting there with a bleeding bird, who’s alternately showing laurie the toe hey! lookie! and playing with it look! I can write my name on your shirt!. Laurie’s trying to get the clotting stuff out, but the damned bird is too busy enjoying herself to cooperate. All the while, we have two cats wanderin around the chaos going need help? what’s going on?.

So I grab the bird and start treating the wound, Laurie gets the cats into the back half of the house, and then I’m trying to get the vet’s number out of my cel phone so Laurie can call in that we’re coming, because I’m not sure I’m going to get it stopped. Tatiana, at this point, is standing on her cage, holding out her foot for me to work on.

Finally, I get enough goo and pressure on the crack that it slows, then stops. Tatiana just sits there patiently. I keep tossing clotting factor on it to make sure it really stops (I use styptic powder for toes; flour for blood feathers if at all possible, becaus styptic can be caustic and stings).

So we finally get it stopped, and there’s this clump of clotting factor on the toe. it obviously hurts. Tatiana decides she wants to play with it, of course. So we do five minutes of “no, don’t touch”. half a dozen times, and she tries to pretend she’s preening, to see if she can get to the toe that way (dad’s waiting, nope).

So we play about five minutes of “don’t touch that”, and then she looks at me, and stops trying.

And didn’t touch the toe for the next half hour. After that, it was clear it was going to stay stopped, and since it was past bedtime, we put her to bed.

Now you tell me, how many dogs would have figured it out without a victorian collar? Few. I’ll check it tomorrow to see if it needs to be seen by the vet — she probably ought to be looked at, since it’s been about two months since we stopped her hormone treatments (that’s another whole long story…).

But to me, here’s the real reason I feel she’s intelligent: when she’s really, really mad at me for some reason, she’ll do something to get herself in trouble, just because she knows that makes me crazy — and then take and put herself back in her cage and wait for me to catch up. The kid who did something to spite her parents, and the sent herself to her room.

That, folks, is what life with a cockatoo is like. Crows got nothing on my little white friend here (and that shouldn’t surprise you. In australia and the tropics, the cockatoo lives in the same ecological niche that the crow fills here in North America…)

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