Are Birds Clever?

To comment on the cleverness or stupidity of birds, one has to be anthropomorphic – how else translate their actions, and give them a meaning? So that’s the way I’ve tried to think about it and I’m afraid I’ve come to the conclusion that they’re nothing but a pretty face - the “bird brain” label sticks. Chickens are stupid. When they’re scared, they huddle together and suffocate each other; and they rush across roads in the face of oncoming traffic. In fact their brains are so redundant that they can still run around without them.From my experience, geese too are stupid, never mind what the Romans say – they can’t in fact tell friend from foe, and gaggle indiscriminately. My landlady in Harare had a flock of them in her garden that refused to recognise me as a legitimate, fully paid-up tenant. What’s more stupid looking (and actually, bloody frightening) than seeing 12 geese rush at you, necks outstretched, hissing? Hadeda ibises are stupid – they fly over our heads crying with hunger but don’t spot our invitingly cricket-pitted lawn.Grey hooded kingfishers are stupid – they get the crickets, but try to take a short cut by flying through our closed windows.Lesser striped swallows are stupid – they take a wrong turning out of their nests and into our dining room and can’t retrace their steps to get out again.Then there’s the male pintailed whydah, aka King of Six – the quintessentially stupid domineering male. For most of the year he’s just an LBJ* among other LBJs, humble, small, insignificant. But come October, he has a rush of testosterone, grows a very long tail, and becomes the nastiest bully on the block. The books say he has six wives (or five, depending on the source) and it is for them that he chases all other birds away – and not only birds: this twopenny’s worth of feathers even swoops furiously at us, fully grown, adult humans if we come near the bird tray. The bulbuls, the black collared barbets, the cape- white eyes, all larger them he is, keep away in the face of this harassment. After two months of exhausting aggression, the females have (one assumes) eaten their fill (though that’s not certain, because he seems to chase them off as much as anything or anyone else), and they “cuckoo” (i.e. lay their eggs in) the nests of the common waxbill. Then the long tail feathers drop off the male, and he becomes just another meek little hopping LBJ again. The only ones who maybe come out quite well in all this are the female whydahs – perhaps not so stupid: they drop off their young and run.

* Little Brown Job