alt Hacker NewsWatching cockatoos figure out stuff like this really makes me wonder have we been seriously underestimating bird intelligence all this time? We tend to associate tool use with primates, but parrots, corvids, and kea keep proving us wrong in the smartest ways. Honestly, maybe “avian cognition” deserves its own category of advanced problem solving. There’s probably a lot we could learn from their behavior not just about animals, but about ourselves and the systems we build.
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I can't speak for the average person but I don't think I've encountered many intelligent people who don't also recognize bird intelligence. They have a greater neuron packing density than mammals and there's plenty footage online of corvids using tools.
> have we been seriously underestimating bird intelligence all this time
another question that I keep asking myself is: are we seriously overestimating human intelligence all this time?
Ehhh it's definitely nuanced but we certainly haven't been dramatically overlooking anything fundamental.
The prevailing wisdom has been that a fully developed cockatoo has roughly the intelligence of a 3 year old.
A 3 year old figuring out how to use a drinking fountain wouldn't be world-breaking science, and I don't think this is either.
We have proven that they don't understand language and can simply mimic sounds. I don't think it's as deep as you are hoping.
Their brain:body mass ratio is very high, so they've been on our intelligence radar for years, especially corvids.
Avian cognition is so darn interesting. We associate the mammalian neocortex with "higher intelligence" (which is hand-wavy), but that structure arose after any common ancestor with birds.
The avian pallium is thought to be the analogue structure in birds, evolved separately.
Which is cool! Birds have separately evolved intelligence!