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What makes an animal “smart” to us? Is it being a relatable mammal, like  an elephant, or dolphin, or primate?

Is it doing some set of behaviors  that we think of as complex? Or is it just having a big ol’ brain? The thing is, we’ve been kinda  fixated on that last one.

But lots of birds are capable  of complex problem solving, and even language, to a degree that seems  too advanced if we just look at brain size. After all, like a crow brain and a  chimp brain are not the same size, yet some birds and great apes have been documented  performing cognitive tasks at similar levels. So how do birds match wits with animals whose  brains are tens of times bigger than theirs?

And also, what does it even mean to be “intelligent?” [♪♪ INTRO ♪♪] The Bizarre Beasts pin club is open  for subscriptions for the whole month! You can sign up by January 20th and the first  pin you get will be a gorgeous Goffin’s cockatoo. One famous example of clever birds is the  research attempting to teach parrots human speech.

Alex the gray parrot is maybe  the most well known case. He learned around 100 words to answer questions  about shapes, numbers, materials, and actions, and even got pretty good at math,  both verbally and symbolically. But as impressive as straight-up talking may seem, some critics have chalked up these results  to just a complex form of conditioning.

They argue that test subjects like Alex weren’t  actually internalizing the meaning of words, but were instead simply memorizing the  sounds and the contexts for using them. An argument could be made that  that’s just what language is, but luckily there are plenty of other examples  of bird intelligence that we can focus on, too. Like, in a recent episode, we covered the lengths  humans have to go to in order to outwit ravens causing trouble, and plenty of members of the  corvid family are capable of similar shenanigans.

For example, New Caledonian crows can  plan several steps ahead while using tools and ignoring distractions,  and carrion crows letting cars crack nuts for them in crosswalks  have been observed for decades. In another raven study, one group was  given the choice of an immediate reward or a token to trade for a future, better  reward, while a second group was given the choice of an immediate reward or a  tool to retrieve a better reward later. The ravens offered the  token or the tool consistently went for that delayed gratification option.

I have a hard time with that! And corvids aren’t the only birds to use tools. Woodpecker finches in the Galapagos use  cactus spines to catch hard-to-reach bugs and hyacinth macaws use pieces of wood  to stabilize nuts as they crack them.

Palm cockatoos use musical  instruments to attract mates, and a disabled kea named Bruce has even been  observed regularly and selectively using tiny pebbles to help him preen in place of  the missing upper half of his beak. The brains of corvids and parrots, in particular,  stand out from those of other birds in much the same way that the brains of great apes  stand out from those of other primates, and some very cool experiments  have come out about these groups. For instance, one research team demonstrated  that Goffin’s cockatoos can not only use tools, but can discern when to use different  types of tools in combination, and when to bring one or more of  those tools with them for future use.

This use of tool sets is distinct  from just using a tool and then trying another one based on  what happens with the first, and the experiment was designed to look  for this difference with the cockatoos. A box with a nut inside was set up in such  a way that the cockatoos would have to use one tool to puncture a membrane, and  then a second tool to reach the nut. Another easy-to-reach membrane on  the other side of the box allowed the cockatoos to learn what it was and how  to break it before the testing started.

These test subjects easily learned how to use  one tool for poking and one tool for reaching, so the next step was to see if they  could determine when to use each, or if they were simply  trying stuff until it worked. Subsequent experiments showed  that the cockatoos could tell, based on the box’s setup, whether  to use both tools or just one. And in a third experiment, the cockatoos had to  decide whether to bring any of the tools with them when walking or flying to a box in a new location,  and if so, whether to bring one or both tools.

Despite the added difficulty  of carrying both tools, the test subjects nonetheless did so  when moving to boxes requiring both, and occasionally carried only one when  moving to a box that required only one. This kind of tool set use has only been observed  in the wild in chimpanzees and Goffin’s cockatoos. So hopefully we’re in agreement  now that birds are pretty brainy.

But their brains are pretty tiny. Some ape brains are bigger than some entire  birds that we have just talked about. So does having a bigger brain not  really make that big of a difference?

Well, scientists have found a positive  correlation between cognition and brain size within taxonomic groups, so there’s  more justification for this than just “brain equals think, more  brain equals more think.” At least in primates, tool use, social  learning, and the ability to come up with new behaviors when needed all  seem to increase with brain volume. That is, there are actual metrics  for what we consider intelligent behavior that do correlate with brain size. But this correlation doesn’t necessarily show  up between distantly-related groups of animals.

Instead, intelligence may be more a matter of  what types of brain structures an animal has, and in what proportion to  the other parts of its brain. For us mammals, the neocortex is considered the main cognitive brain bit, but  birds don’t have one of those. Instead, the front portion of  their brain is made up from different structures that  may perform a similar role.

And birds and mammals do both have  a brain stem, which is responsible for more unconscious functions that we  might not associate with thinking per se. So one crude way to assess capacity for  intelligence in both birds and mammals would be to measure the ratio between these analogous  front parts of their brains and their brain stems. And interestingly enough, this ratio for  parrots and corvids differs from other birds in a very similar way to how it does  for great apes compared to other primates.

In other words, having a big  forebrain seems to be the main trait distinguishing both great apes and  the most intelligent birds from their peers, even if the exact makeup of this forebrain  differs greatly between birds and apes. Animal smarts are also associated  with certain sections in the midbrain, and the way that these connect to each other. And sure enough, birds also follow similar patterns here to analogous  brain regions in primates.

Cooler still, and absolutely bizarre, corvids and parrots have as many neurons as – and sometimes significantly more neurons than – primates with significantly larger brains, meaning that part of the key to so much  thinking in so small a space is the fact that these birds might simply be more  efficiently packing their processing power. All this suggests that the brain  architecture necessary for complex cognitive function convergently evolved  from different ancestral brain structures, all with the result of some real smarty-pantses  in different parts of the animal kingdom. So why have we always been so hung up on apes?

Unfortunately, when comparing  ourselves to other animals, we can be a bit insecure  about intelligence, it seems. The centuries-old mentality that some special  quality must separate us from other species still shows up even in modern research, leading us  to focus only on our closest non-human relatives. Many of the tests we use to  even assess animal cognition are completely based on human experiences – like mirror self-recognition tests – or based on ways of thinking that may  just be exclusively a human thing.

So what we call intelligence has often just  meant a metric of how human some species can act. And it hasn’t helped that decades worth of animal  studies have also included the stated goal of measuring an animal’s intelligence purely as some  proportion of our own, resulting in claims like “dogs are as smart as a two-year-old child!”. Luckily, over the last few decades, scientists have been slowly shifting their  focus from a human-based interpretation of what intelligence is, to an evolution- and  adaptation-based interpretation instead.

After all, knowing why animals use their  brains in the cool ways that they do is a lot more useful than just trying to pick  out which animals are most identical to us. Shifting our focus from “how can  these non-human animals be so smart?” to, instead, “how can being smart  provide an evolutionary advantage?” allows us to better understand  intelligence as an adaptation instead of as some je ne sais quoi that  only the most special creatures can have. Absolutely, there are plenty  of lifeforms whose evolutionary success has not exactly relied  on a lot of quick thinking – I'm looking at you, slime molds – but that strategy has been  super valuable for others!

It’s a big, wild world out there, full of unexpected challenges for beasts  like parrots and corvids to navigate. And when we start looking at thought as  a tool for solving ecological problems, the many different brains of the world  start to seem a bit less bizarre. Signing up for the pin club  at BizarreBeastsShow.com helps keep the channel going.

If you want a brainy bird to be your  first pin, sign up by January 20th. We’ve got some amazing artists lined  up for this year so do not miss out! And now for some bonus facts… [♪♪ BONUS FACTS ♪♪] Earlier in the episode, I mentioned  palm cockatoos in one study used musical instruments to attract mates and that feels like it maybe needs a little more explanation.

How do you play a musical instrument if you are a bird and don't have hands?! I know they’ve got pretty dextrous feet,  uh, but I have yet to see one with a guitar. Well it turns out, palm cockatoos are more into the drums.

Specifically, they made drumsticks from sticks and seed pods, and tapped them rhythmically  against trees during mating displays. They tended to use sticks  more often than seed pods, and each male customized the size  and shape of his drumsticks – he didn't just copy his neighbors. I also pointed out that bird brains  can be small in absolute size, while packing a lot of efficient processing power… But you can also look at  relative brain size across birds, scaling brain size to body mass to  compare different birds to each other.

It might not come as a surprise after  watching this episode, but parrots, corvids, and owls tend to have bigger brains  relative to their bodies than many other birds. And a study published in 2023  suggested that the thing driving the evolution of relatively big brains  in birds is parental provisioning – including variables like how  big the egg is and how much time parents spend bringing food to their babies. And this makes a lot of sense!

Big brains require a lot of energy,  which means big-brained babies need a lot of resources, and many of these  brainy birds are born pretty helpless… which means their parents  have to invest a lot in them. And that actually reminds me a lot of…us! Or, primates in general, who also  tend to be born helpless and have bigger brains relative to body  size than many other mammals.

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