Documentary "Bird Brain" Annotation

Derek Liu

This week, we watched a documentary, named "Bird Brain". As we all might think, birds are very small creatures and they only have tiny brains compared to humans, and they obviously don't have the thinking skills like humans. So what are we going to find researching their brains? If you have the similar thought, this documentary would subvert your belief.

In this documentary, many researchers did several tests on Kea Parrots and Ravens to find out whether they are behaving based on instinct or intelligence. The documentary pointed out this question in the beginning, "Is everything a bird does ruled by instinct or do they have what we would considered, intelligence" (7:38). This excerpt gave the audience a clear direction of this documentary and what the researches are going to be about. The researchers understand the question of the audience about how the birds could think with their small brains. John Marzluff, a researcher and professor of wildlife science from the University of Washington, said in the documentary, "So even though they are physically very small in size, they have a lot of punch in that size" (13:46). Compare to their body size, their brain size is more than enough.

Auguste Von Bayern, a zoologist from the University of Oxford set up a puzzle for a kea parrot and a raven. Bayern asked them to find solutions to get food that hide in the puzzle. There are solutions like sticks and doors. If the birds are not capable of thinking, all they going to do will be wandering around and staring at the food they can't get. However, as the experiment goes on, both raven and kea bird found the solutions to the puzzle and successfully eat the food. The solutions usually require multiple steps like opening the door, using the stick, finding the right tunnel to reach the food, etc. This result showed that birds actually have multiple levels of thinking. "Both birds found four different solutions to the puzzle, showing they are able to think flexibly" (21:29).

This documentary is related to one of the Time articles we read back in week 1, named "Intelligence", by Jeffrey Kluger. Kluger explained that animals have very similar feelings and thinking skills to humans, just not as vivid as humans. Kluger mentioned in the article, "Crowds and other corvids excel at tool use, a function of both clever brain writing and the bird's complex social structure. This is exactly what Bayern is trying to show in her experiment. The birds have the ability to use tools which shows that their brains are just as complex as humans' and they are also capable of thinking.

After watching this documentary, I learned that the birds are not stupid at all. It is true that they are very small in size, and they have a simpler thinking process. They are still able to solve complex problems and puzzles. More importantly, their brains are intelligent enough to support thinking and solving, which is what the researchers in this documentary trying to show us.

Some of the other researchers in this documentary include Christina Riehl, an Ecology researcher at the University of Princeton, and Ludwig Huber, a zoologist at the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna.