“Living Link To Velociraptor” Birds Are Surprisingly Intelligent

What we knew – and didn’t know – about bird intelligence

It’s old news at this point that birds are smarter than we’ve often assumed. Crows can do math better than some toddlers; cockatoos can plan and craft tools (and tell saucy jokes to boot); ravens can match or even outsmart apes in cognitive skill; and Norfolk Island green parrots have figured out a way to get clean and high at the same time. Bird-brained, these species are not.

But perhaps you’ve noticed a common theme with those examples: they’re all corvids and parrots, aka the smartest birds we know of. If we looked at other species – say, the emus, rheas, or ostriches, whose brains are famously smaller than their eyeballs – maybe we wouldn’t be so hasty to reconsider bird intelligence.

We have more data on their brain size and structure than on their problem-solving skills. So for a long time, we have assumed rather than confirmed they are ‘unintelligent’.

Fay Clark

Well, there’s only one way to find out, right? This is why researchers from the University of Bristol, UK, led by comparative experimental psychologist and senior lecturer in psychology Fay Clark, decided to investigate the problem-solving abilities of the paleognaths.

“We wanted to shine a light on understudied species,” explained Clark. “Palaeognaths were appealing because even though they live on multiple continents and some are common and even farmed in places, almost nothing is known about their cognitive skills.” 

“We have more data on their brain size and structure than on their problem-solving skills,” she told IFLScience. “So for a long time, we have assumed rather than confirmed they are ‘unintelligent’.”

How to test an emu

Now, bird cognition research is a pretty well-established field, and there are a few tried-and-tested methods for establishing what a beaky brainiac can and cannot do. Generally, it goes like this: you show a bird some food sitting behind or within some barrier, and see whether they can figure out a way to obtain it.

None of those were used in this study. “We appreciate [they] would be the preferred approach of many scholars, particularly when working with new taxa,” the team notes in the paper, but scaling them up to fit the bodies of paleognaths would result in an experiment that was neither “practical nor safe,” they point out. 

As an alternative, therefore, they developed a new test, in which the task was to rotate a wheel until a compartment containing food lined up with two holes, allowing access to the treat within. That’s “quite an abstract thing for an animal to understand,” Clark explains, “because they are adding two things together, rather than subtracting one from the other.”

The new design is, however, something of a double-edged sword. The rotary task is better suited to how birds forage – not performing one particular action per food item, but working out a whole solution – and requires less human interaction to refill. On the other hand, it puts any results from the experiment in a totally new category, not quite comparable with data from other birds until they perform their own version of the rotary task.

The results

So, how did the bird-brains fare? Well, surprisingly well, in fact: “The birds exceeded our expectations,” Clark tells IFLScience. “From prior accounts of these birds, we expected them to peck indiscriminately at anything we put in front of them. We thought they might randomly poke the task and the wheel would move in any direction.” 

We do not know why the ostriches in our study performed so poorly – it could be a true cognitive difference, but could also be their personality and disinterest in the task at the time.

Fay Clark

Instead, she points out, “they moved the wheel in the correct direction (towards food, not away) 9 times out of 10.” All three emus and one rhea were able to figure out the solution within the first attempt, the paper reports – and they managed to reproduce that success more than 50 times, so it probably wasn’t random chance that got them to the answer. In fact, the rhea managed to hack the test entirely at one point, opting to disassemble the entire apparatus instead of nimbly seeking out the single food-laden compartment within the wheel (and you know what? We respect it. That counts.)

“Rheas are relatively small and quite dainty palaeognaths,” Clark tells IFLScience, “so when the male suddenly ambushed the task and dismantled it by removing the bolt it really caught us by surprise.”

Still, not all the birds could figure out a solution – or even wanted to try. None of the ostriches managed to even move the wheel, and the other rhea subject didn’t seem interested in the test at all. 

“We […] need to give the ostriches another shot,” Clark says. “We do not know why the ostriches in our study performed so poorly – it could be a true cognitive difference, but could also be their personality and disinterest in the task at the time. We need to recruit more ostriches for further work.”

Overall, though, it’s good news for the paleognaths. Their innovation skills may technically be “low level” or “simplistic,” but they’re certainly not “dumb” – and that has some pretty cool implications for other areas of research as well. 

As “a ‘living link’ to extinct dinosaurs like velociraptors,” Clark tells IFLScience, we might be able to infer something about how these prehistoric species once behaved – with the capacity for innovation perhaps having evolved much earlier than previously thought. 

For Clark, however, the greater appeal is with the living animals. “I am mainly interested in the links between animal cognition and emotion,” she tells IFLScience. “A lot of my work focuses on how animals feel when we give them games and puzzles, so I hope to expand this work to big birds.”

The study is published in the journal Scientific Reports.