I live in a city and enjoy seeing all the pigeons everywhere. It's certainly forgivable when a little toddler runs about after them in the square, because they must be such a novelty to little babies, since they move above and live on their own. The 13 year old Mr big-&-clever-machismo spitting and kicking at them in front of his friends isn't so innocent, and neither is the crusty old man taking a boot at them for pecking at crumbs, who ought to have learnt better by now.
Birds are great.
Pigeon fact: if the pigeon's iris has turned orange, it is older than 6-12 months! Before then, the eye is entirely brown/black.
I came across this lately,
"...for example, pigeons can memorize up to 725 different visual patterns (von Fersen & Delius, '89), learn to categorize objects as 'human-made' versus 'natural' (Lubow, '74), discriminate cubistic and impressionistic styles of painting (Watanabe, Sakamoto, Wakita, '95), communicate using visual symbols (Lubinski & MacCorquodale, '84), rank patterns using transitive inferential logic (von Fersen, Wynne, Delius, '92) and occasionally 'lie' (Lanza, Starr & Skinner, '82) (Munn, '86).
New Caledonian crows make tools** out of leaves or novel human-made material, use them appropriately to retrieve food and are thought to pass this knowledge on to other crows through social learning (Weir, Chappell & Kacelnik, 2002) (Hunt & Gray, 2003).
Magpies develop an understanding of object constancy at an earlier relative age in their lifespan than any other organism tested and can use this skill to the same extent as humans (Pollok, Prior & Gunturkun, 2000).
Scrub-jays show episodic memory - the ability to recall events that take place at a specific time or place, which was once thought to be unique to humans (Clayton & Dickinson, '98). This same species modifies its food-storing strategy according to the possibility of future stealing by other birds and, therefore, exhibits a behaviour that would qualify as theory-of-mind (Emery & Clayton, 2001).
Owls have a highly sophisticated capacity for sound localization, used for nocturnal hunting, that rivals that of humans and that is developed through learning (Knudsen, 2002).
Parrots, hummingbirds and oscine songbirds possess the rare skill of vocal learning (Jarvis, 2000). This trait is a prerequisite in humans for spoken language and, with the exceptions of cetaceans and possibly bats, is not found in any other mammal (Jarvis, '04). In addition, parrots can learn human words and use them to communicate reciprocally with humans. African grey parrots, in particular, can use human words in numerical and relational concepts (Pepperberg, '99) (Pepperberg & Shive, '01), abilities that were once thought to be unique to humans.
So, many birds have cognitive proficiencies that are quite sophisticated, and some birds and mammals have cognitive proficiencies that clearly exceed all other birds and mammals."
The Avian Brain Nomenclature Forum, 2005
**Some clips of crows being clever
Great Japanese crows
Another great crow
Third great crow (probably captive)
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