HAMBURG (dpa) – Many seabirds are able to navigate to within centimetres of their nests, even in the middle of a hurricane while an eagle can spot prey from a remarkable height.
When it come to manoeuvrability and perception, birds are vastly superior to humans and some birds have proven themselves to be extremely clever as well. Results of studies currently being carried out, mainly on birds belonging to the crow family, the Corvidae, show just how smart these feathered friends can be.Research at the Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany, on magpies, a member of the crow family, has yielded surprising results. Studies of eight magpies at the university have more than proven the proverbial craftiness of these birds.In tests where objects were hidden for the birds to find, these young magpies achieved scores which would normally only be attained by humans, anthropoid apes and dogs. It would seem the birds are also able to recognise themselves in the mirror, it was reported in the latest edition of Rubin, the university’s science magazine.Magpies have been tested and found capable of finding concealed objects moved from one location to another without having seen this being done. The ability to find objects is of extreme importance to the birds for their survival, because they often store food in hidden places and need to find it again. When fledgling birds leave the nest at around ten weeks old, they are already masters of the art.Another outstanding aspect of the magpies is their complex social behaviour. They are able to identify individual members of their flock. Intricate experiments with mirrors conducted by the University in Bochum have shown an amazing level of self-perception in the birds.Compared to a budgerigar, for example, which even after years will still regard the image in its mirror as just another members of the budgie race, magpies inspect their reflection in an investigative and inquisitive manner.This self-oriented behaviour of marked magpies in front of a mirror implies that the birds are aware of their own bodies.In an interview with the German Press Agency dpa, behavioural researcher Helmut Prior, a member of the Bochum University team, said that until fairly recently the performance abilities of such birds had been underestimated. This was evident primarily in the field of memory, says Prior, referring to recent studies being carried out by British researchers Nicola Clayton and Anthony Dickinson.This research has shown that the blue jay, another member of the crow family, is capable of remembering several things simultaneously, not only the location where food was hidden, for example, but also when the food was hidden and what kind it was, allowing the jay a more flexible use of its stores.Another research result cited by Prior is the immense memory capacity of some birds. In the case of jays, the ability to remember thousands of individual locations has been observed by American researchers Alan Kamil and Russel Balda. Comparable performance in mammals is not known, however warm-blooded creatures have other strengths and advantages.One reason why birds have been underestimated for so long is the fact that the make-up of their brains differs so drastically from those of mammals and humans.It is probable that the incredible performances of these birds, carried out via the cerebral cortex, is processed using a nervous system constructed and switched differently to that of other creatures. It is, in any case, a highly organised piece of anatomy.The types of performance differ from bird to bird. The motor for the development of the enormous learning ability was probably the fact that the learning itself brought the crow family of birds many advantages. In comparison, Prior cites the carrier pigeon which has developed different abilities. Pigeons can only remember a few feeding places but are capable of astonishing feats of orientation.A rough guideline to the age of the birds and their separate species shows that the forerunners of birds and mammals split in their common development around 300 million years ago. Around 150 million years later the ur-birds, the first real birds, appeared.The family of the crows, the Corvidae, appeared on the scene about 50 to 60 million years ago and the oldest crow fossils in Europe are some 25 million years old. The present species of birds developed over the last few million years.
