Birdbrains are not so stupid say scientists

The next time someone calls you a "birdbrain", take it as a compliment. 

An international group of scientists who have reanalysed birds' abilities and concluded that some are smarter than some so-called brainy mammals.

Their analysis, published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience, has brought calls from around the world to Auckland University brain scientist Dr Martin Wild, who sparked off the rethink while on sabbatical in the US in 1997.

"It's caused an unbelievable stir - stories on the front page of the New York Times and in the Washington Post," he said. "It spread like wildfire."

Dr Wild's original questions about the classification of birds' brains led to the formation of an "avian brain nomenclature consortium" of 29 scientists from six countries who have now formally proposed relabelling parts of the bird's brain structure.

A large part of the bird brain, which had been thought to control purely instinctive behaviour, has now been recognised to be more like the "neocortex" which governs sophisticated functions such as learning and language in humans.

Although most bird brains are tiny, so are most birds, so they need fewer brain connections than heavier mammals need to control limbs and organs.

"For the size of a bird, they are remarkable," Dr Wild said. "Some of the parrots and crows are on the same level of brain:body ratio as many mammals and even primates."

Or, as co-author Dr Erich Jarvis of North Carolina's Duke University told Reuters: "Stop calling people birdbrains meaning stupid. Take it as a compliment."

Dr Wild said work by Auckland University psychologist Gavin Hunt on New Caledonian crows was a key part of the evidence that birds were brainier than we thought.

"These birds can use tools," he said. "There is a paper out this week in Nature showing that even juvenile crows that have never seen any adults using these tools can use them, and use them appropriately.

"Whereas a chimpanzee will use tools, they make mistakes in the way they use them. These crows never make mistakes. They can put a tool into a hole to get food, or get stuff out of a long tube by fashioning a hook tool.

"It's remarkable to watch. You can almost see the bird thinking, it's as if the light comes on above the bird's brain and it just goes to the jar and whips out the food."

In Japan, carrion crows have been reported to wait for traffic lights to turn red, then drop walnuts on the road, let cars run over the nuts and then hop back to pick up the cracked nuts after the cars have passed.

Dr Wild's own research has shown that songbirds learn the distinctive songs of their species using the same part of their brains as humans used to learn a language. Analysis of birds was teaching scientists how the human brain might also work.

"The great advantage of these songbird brains is that they have collections of cells and neural pathways dedicated to learning and producing song," he said. "That makes it a very attractive model."