Posted on 06/15/2016 9:34:48 AM PDT by JimSEA
The macaw has a brain the size of an unshelled walnut, while the macaque monkey has a brain about the size of a lemon. Nevertheless, the macaw has more neurons in its forebrain -- the portion of the brain associated with intelligent behavior -- than the macaque.
That is one of the surprising results of the first study to systematically measure the number of neurons in the brains of more than two dozen species of birds ranging in size from the tiny zebra finch to the six-foot-tall emu, which found that they consistently have more neurons packed into their small brains than are stuffed into mammalian or even primate brains of the same mass.
The study results were published online in a paper titled "Birds have primate-like numbers of neurons in the forebrain" in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences early edition on the week of June 13.
"For a long time having a 'bird brain' was considered to be a bad thing: Now it turns out that it should be a compliment," said Vanderbilt University neuroscientist Suzana Herculano-Houzel, senior author of the paper with Pavel N?mec at the Charles University in Prague.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencedaily.com ...
I'm not surprised about the new estimate of bird intelligence. I think anyone who has watched birds will agree they are smart.
I don’t care what anyone says...crows are among the smartest non-human animals on the planet!
I agree they are amazing.
Some birds will ‘fowl’ their own nests!
Ounce for ounce liberal humans have significantly more morons in their brains
"Designing"? "Playing"? I thought this process, i.e., nature, was mindless, chaotic chance. If so, then these words sound fanciful, magical.
Up next, perhaps a similar study on hares? Beetles?
I’ve owned macaws and they are said to have the mind of a three-year-old human. Of course, they are largely fun-loving playful mimics but they are very bright if you understand what is important to them. They learn mostly by cause-and-effect and they enjoy drama which is why they learn curse words quicker than other words. If you can make learning a cause-and-effect game, they’ll pick it up.
They make fun pets if you have the time to give them the regular interaction they require.
At times crows roost in some pine trees very close to my neighbor’s house. He is a young fellow in his late twenties. One day as the sun was setting and the crows showed up I was standing in his yard talking with him. He said something about the crows and I told him that they could tell a stick from a gun. He seemed to doubt that so I told him to point the short stick which he had just picked up from his yard at the crows as if it were a gun and see what happened. They paid him no attention so I then asked him to go and get his shotgun. When he stepped out of the backdoor and pointed the gun toward the trees they didn’t pay any attention but I told him to walk over next to me as he was standing under the carport where he was not visible to the crows. He approached with the gun at his side pointed straight down and when he reached me I said, “Now, turn around and shoulder the gun”. As soon as he did there was a warning call from the sentry and all the crows left. I think it made a believer out of him.
Very interesting story. That means most “scarecrows” are useless exercises in futility... Or perhaps the crows are toying with the people that put them out...
was mindless, chaotic chance.
Where did you get that idea. Evolution is “whatever works” natural selection with a little bit of usually harmless drift. Mutations are random but whether or not they persist in the species is anything but random.
“That means most “scarecrows” are useless exercises in futility.”
Actually I think they mostly are. I grew up on a small farm in South Carolina and we grew watermelons for market every year. We had little trouble on our place, once in a while we would find a melon damaged but we did not shoot crows or try to scare them. Believe it or not on some neighboring fields where people would sit and call them in to a shotgunner or put out firecracker ropes(a long cord which would burn slowly and set off a firecracker every few minutes) I have seen huge numbers of watermelons ruined by crows who would peck one hole in each melon just deep enough to penetrate the rind and let air into the inside which would cause the melon to rot on the vine. Very rarely was there a second hole in the same one. These were large watermelons, mostly over forty pounds, sometimes double that. The average value was fifty cents or better at the farm back in the fifties when people were happy to earn a buck and a quarter an hour at a factory job. I can state firsthand that those who made the greatest efforts to defeat the crows suffered far more damage. I still see fake Owls sold as scarecrows but I don’t think they work. Crows are certainly not afraid of Red Tailed Hawks, they will in fact chase the Hawks, I have seen that for myself. I don’t know why they would be afraid of Owls.
I refer principally to the oft-employed device of personification by writers of pop-science, whether for periodicals, or television.
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