Bird brains (2023)

If you're in tune with animals and spend time around a parrot, it's obvious there is a lot going on in their minds. They have incredible memories and their own understanding of their world. It looks simple to us but they are not simple creatures. That being said, I don't know how a bird lover can keep a bird in a cage.

Adding to this a chart of neuron count [1]

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n...

If you'd like to read a long-form version of this, take a look at Jennifer Ackerman's "The Bird Way" from 2020. Really loved this book.

https://www.jenniferackermanauthor.com/the-bird-way

Also, just my opinion, but Kea's are the best bird there is.

I work on some aspects of intelligence in birds, primarily in songbirds. There have been some effort finding general intelligence ("g" cognitive factor) in birds since last 15-20 years. The results have been mixed as you would expect. Animals' intelligence have evolved for survival and designing experiments to test those are quite hard.

Research has shown brain size matters but not that much, we should look at relative brain size.

Parrot owner here. This doesn't surprise me at all. I'm actually a bit surprised they cared about the gyms!

This fits right into the ABC model of parrot psychology:

https://www.parrots.org/pdfs/all_about_parrots/reference_lib...

Makes sense, given that to birds, optimizing for weight is everything. But seeing that the ridiculously smart border collies have a comparatively low density of neurons, clearly there’s more to intelligence than that.

Worth nothing that the "mirror test" may not be accurate for a lot of animals - like dogs. Dogs are a lot more sensitive to smell, and can pass smell-based mirror-test-equivalents.

I love watching magpies. I have seen them tease cats by "foraging" just out of sprint and leap distance. They quickly fly up to a tree when the cat moves, always keeping an eye on it, and resume when the cat resets, as other magpies in the group watch from above. I've seen them harass a hawk try to eat a fresh hunt, six magpies surrounding it, taking turns pecking at the hawk's tail until it leaves.

They have interesting interactions with the hooded crows, tolerant of each other but still competitive over food. If a white tailed eagle enters they area they will together team up and attempt to chase it away.

They have complex social interactions with each. I've seen a younger magpie in a group get pinned down by a dominant one while several in the group pecked at its belly, because it ate out of order. They acknowledge even me, their neighbor, who occasionally leaves some winter food out for them.

Anyone who is fortunate to spend real time in or at the edge of nature, and takes the time to observe, should be humbled by the complexity and intelligence of the world around us. Some species stand out, of course, like the magpies.

Most of what we have created as the human race is best characterized as complication rather than complexity, when compared to the utter complexity of the natural world. In the era of AI I find it amusing that we believe we're approaching being able to construct a kind of real intelligence when so many can barely recognize, let alone understand, the "lesser" forms of intelligence around us.

“More neurons = intelligence” always felt like an oversimplification. If that were true, we wouldn’t be surprised by birds or octopuses anymore.

The Australian sulfur-crested cockatoos are pretty smart. They would teach each other how to open heavy bin lids to raid the garbage. I seem to remember they would even team up to do it. There are studies about how this behaviour spread from suburb to suburb in Sydney.[1]

More recently they've figured out how to operate drinking fountains.[2][3]

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/cockatoos-lear...

[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2025-06-04/sydney-sulphu...

[3] https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/nature-wildlife/2025...

> A macaw's brain weighs 20 grams and has roughly the same number of forebrain neurons as a macaque monkey's brain at 70 grams. Ounce for ounce, bird brains are some of the most computationally dense organs in the animal kingdom.

Been to NZ once. Keas are indeed the coolest parrots ever. Climb to the top of Avalanche Peak and you’re guaranteed to see some soaring in the sky, with snowy Mt. Rolleston in the background. Kiwis call them alpine parrots, but they are not. They were common on both islands before Polynesian/Maori hunted many of them, and European ranchers forced them to retreat to high beech forests and alpine zones. Another place is Dart Hut, I even found some kea feathers there.

https://nautil.us/the-great-silence-237510

One of my all time favourite short stories, with or without intelligent parrots.

Time for me to read it again. This is the Arecibo story, don't miss if you haven't read it before.

"You be good".

Strangely enough, was having a lot of difficulty coaxing google to fetch this link.

Kea also make and use tools, e.g. to set off stoat traps to get the bait: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/366747/clever-kea-using-..., https://twig.technology/blog/alpine-kea-trap-tampering

Intelligence seems to have evolved on Earth at least three times - mammals, octopuses, and corvids. These are different branches of the evolutionary tree, and the brain architectures are quite different. Octopuses have a distributed system. Corvids get more done with less brain volume and power than mammals.

Before our first trip to New Zealand, March of 2001, we did a lot of research because the plan was to drive up the South Island from the southern tip to the northern, then ferry across to the North Island. We consulted three different Travel books and they all said to be sure to get the rental car insurance and specifically mentioned the Keas.

Sure enough, when we pulled over to a scenic pull over where other cars were, on the way to Milford Sound, there were a couple of Keas attacking a car windshied rubber gasket. I shooed them away, only to see them return. They are really beautiful, mischievous creatures.

Makes me think of our current quest with creating AGI, that the metrics for measuring animal brains don't necessarily correlate nicely with "intelligence" or capability.

I imagine an alternate world filled only with intelligent robots that are trying to create "biological-agi" from scratch and are supremely frustrated at the results, throwing neuron count and density at the problem without understanding the fundamental properties that actually create intelligence.

Reminds me of:

https://www.nature.com/news/2007/070716/full/news070716-15.h...

> Scans reveal a fluid-filled cavity in the brain of a normal man.

Birds are highly optimized. For example, all cells contain a full genome. The genomes in birds are a lot smaller - less trash DNA - which saves them weight and generally makes the cells more efficient.

This is Alex the parrot, mentioned in the article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldYkFdu5FJk

It seems like animals that have to memorize a really wide variety of plants, fruit, flowers, etc tend to have complex and dense brains

Given parrots can talk, there must be a neuron count that activates language (assuming anatomy allows it), similar to LLM parameter count.

Parrots are definitely smart, but birds generally pack a lot into a small mass. That's required for flight.

> Dr. Irene Pepperberg studied an African grey parrot named Alex for 30 years. Alex could identify objects, colours, shapes, and numbers. He understood abstract concepts like "same" and "different." His vocabulary exceeded 100 words. When he died in 2007, his last words to Pepperberg were reportedly "You be good. I love you. See you tomorrow." I don't care how you define intelligence -- that one's hard to brush off.

The author takes forgranted the claim of intelligence; and does not assess at all whether the researcher simply said those words to the parrot every night. (Why not? It sounds exactly like what a researcher would tell a parrot before turning off the lights.) A quick search on Wikipedia says the parrot was also found dead in the morning, not in the implied "parrot has last words" scenario.

It makes you wonder how smart their ancestors- dinosaurs- were.

is this a straight-up advantage, or is the trade-off lower connectivity?

> Calling someone a "bird brain" is honestly more of a compliment.

Well no. Some birds are flat-out dumb. Chickens for example.

bird brains are a die shrink of mammalian brains.

I think that dogs and cats fail the mirror test not because they are unintelligent or lack a "sense of self", but because their sense of self is tied up with their sense of smell. Mirror reflections don't smell like themselves, so they don't recognize the reflection as themselves. They might recognize the reflection as a strange dog or cat, which may provoke aggression.

Birds are evolutionarily optimized for low mass.

This gives a whole new meaning to the term “stochastic parrots” for LLMs :)

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If you haven't seen Apollo on YT, crazy

What is it made out of? meTUL

Want a pistach

I have to imagine that given birds are descendants of dinosaurs, which evolved quite a long time ago, they've had a lot more time to optimize certain things.