Bird Brain

Upon this week's documentary, it revealed that birds have more potential and intelligence than people initially thought. They displayed a series of social and interactional experiments on birds where the results indicated that size of species does not limit the endless possibilities they have. Watching this documentry made me wonder, how do these researchers and scientists come up with these detailed experiments to test an animal's intelligence or their social behaviors? It is quite interesting to see how they came up with the pull test for birds, which examines their knowlege and ability to observe the mechanisms in order to acheive their treat, which was hanging from a string. The experiments not only taught me that birds, in general, can problem solve, but that every type of the bird species can approach the problem solving in a different way. For example, when the Caledonian crow used the stick to push the treat out of the contraption and the Kea parrot approached the experiment by pushing the ball through the chute (18:38). Due to the different native environments of these birds, they will approach a problem differently. I also thought that a crucial part of the documentary was the exploration of the idea that birds have emotions. I think that it is so important for people to realize this because if birds can feel emotion, we cannot dismiss the idea that other animals can as well and this opens up a whole new door of possibilities.

This documentary, in a way, connects to the TIME readings in Week 1, especially the one on intelligence because the article mentions how we typically like to correlate brain size to intelligence. The article on intelligence relates to the documentary because it mentions how many people assume that the bigger the brain, the smarter and more intelligent abilities there are, however the documentary and the reading then go on to reveal that that isn't the case. It is said in the documentary that “Birds brains may be tiny, but for their size, they seem to contain more brain cells, or neurons, than many other animals.” (13:16). So the assumption that we typically have is wrong. The documentary also discusses social groups between birds and how it shows a level of "complex cognitive processing" (28:44) which is a topic discussed in the TIME articles as well. The article mentions how crows work in groups to care for each other but the documentary observes birds in a different way. They showed how birds can learn from one another in social groups and this was tested by having rooks observe another bird successfully obtaining food from a contraption. Through watching the trained bird, the untrained birds would repeat the same actions in order to get their treat, displaying that they have the ability to carry out "very high-level thinking" (31:03).

Overall, the documentary provided me with a learning experience that a researcher must take into account all the small actions and movements a bird makes when they are conducting an experiment. These small movements or actions may seem insignificant at first, but they all stem from, perhaps, their native ancestors, environment, or because their brains have the extreme potential to learn and apply their knowlegde.