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| | | Frontiers explores new ideas in science, meeting the researchers who see the world through fresh eyes and challenge existing theories - as well as hearing from their critics. Many such developments create new ethical and moral questions and Frontiers is not afraid to consider these.
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|  | | | | "Frontiers has taken me to some extraordinary places - physically and intellectually. We've hunted fundamental particles in a Canadian nickel mine, heard how all Chinese folk have perfect pitch and seen how the New World was once populated by Monster Wombats and Mega-Wolves. What fascinates me about this series, though, is the scientists themselves creatively reaching into the mists of unexplored fields, sometimes coming up with some frankly wacky ideas that turn out to be sensible and revolutionary. It's sharp end science at the very apex."
Peter Evans
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Bird Brains
When zoologists at Oxford University recently observed a Caledonian Crow bending a piece of wire into a hook so it could extract food from a bucket, it raised a number of challenging questions about birds' problem-solving abilities. Perhaps birds aren't as bird-brained as we primates like to believe.
Caledonian Crows aren't the only birds to demonstrate what we might loosely call 'intelligence'. Scientists working with Scrub-Jays have discovered that their memory of where they have hidden food caches cannot be explained solely by familiarity with a particular terrain. And what about the decorated nests that male Bower Birds build to attract a mate? Or the parrots that seem to understand what they are saying?
In this week's Frontiers Peter Evans talks to psychologists and zoologists about the extent of avian intelligence - including Irene Pepperberg from Brandeis University. She has a unique kind of parrot - an African grey called Alex with powers of speech that suggest that this is indeed a thinking bird - carrying out, in the jargon, 'cognitive processing' before making any utterance.
So have we underestimated birds' brain power? Will we have to reformulate our concepts of intelligence to take proper account of birds' 'intelligent' actions? Join Peter Evans to find out.
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RELATED LINKS
The Alex Foundation
Grey Parrot Intelligence Studies
Caledonian Crow research
Joah Madden: Bower Bird research (pdf)
Dr. Nicola S. Clayton: Scrub Jay research
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