The Genius of Birds

Birds are really smart. Jennifer Ackerman cites recent research and lots of fascinating anecdotes to illustrate avian intelligence. Narrator Margaret Strom's voice is clear and engaging. Her energy and pacing easily hold the listener's attention. It's an around-the-world tour of Australian bowerbirds stealing blue plastic items for their bowers and dancing to attract a mate, New Caledonian crows making tools to access food, and New Zealand sparrows triggering automatic doors to a cafeteria. Ackerman delves into how mockingbirds learn to mimic the songs of other birds and how migrating birds navigate and find their way again after being knocked off course by a hurricane. Strom sounds suitably amazed by it all, too--a fine match of material and voice. In the future, you will only call somebody a "birdbrain" as praise. A.B. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine

May 2, 2016
Popular science writer Ackerman (Ah-Choo!: The Uncommon Life of Your Common Cold) puts paid to the notion of being birdbrained with this survey of the observational and experimental evidence for impressive bird cognition. She explores birds' capacities for tool use, socialization, navigation, mimicry, discrimination, and possibly even theory of mind. Ackerman interviews specialists without overindulging in research travelogue, keeping centered on her feathered subjects rather than on the human interactions, and urges against anthropomorphizing bird behavior, correlating specific behaviors to generalized intelligence, or benchmarking the value of avian mental skills to that of humans. But her most interesting bits of trivia play to that urge: undergraduates who fail at mental simulations at which some birds succeed, bowerbirds trained to distinguish good human art from bad, Thomas Jefferson's mockingbird singing "popular songs of the day," and pigeons learning to open automatic cafeteria doors. Though Ackerman's focus is mainly ethological, she also speculates on the possible relationships between complex task completion and evolutionary fitness. This light popular science read doesn't present much new framing or insight; Ackerman seeks out current research to discover a few surprises, such as a possible role for olfactory cues in navigation, but doesn't point to or create any big conceptual shifts.