- WASHINGTON, DC --
Crows and jays are the brain boxes of the bird world, according to a Canadian
scientist who has invented a method of measuring avian IQ.
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- The IQ scale is based on the number of novel feeding
behaviours shown by birds in the wild.
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- The test's creator Dr Louis Lefebvre was surprised that
parrots were not high in the pecking order - despite their relatively large
brains.
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- The research was presented at a major science conference
in Washington DC.
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- Feeding innovations
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- The avian intelligence index is based on 2,000 reports
of feeding "innovations" observed in the wild and published in
ornithology journals over a period of 75 years.
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- "We gathered as many examples as we could from the
short notes of ornithology journals about the feeding behaviours that people
had never seen or were unusual," said Dr Lefebvre, of McGill University
in Montreal, Canada.
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- "From that we established different numbers for
different birds. There are differences. There are some kinds of birds that
score higher than others.
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- "The crows, the jays, that kind of bird - the corvidae
- are the tops; then the falcons are second, the hawks the herons and the
woodpecker rank quite high."
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- Dr Lefebvre said that many of the novel feeding behaviours
he included in the work were mundane, but every once in a while, birds
could be spectacularly inventive about obtaining their food.
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- During the war of liberation in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe,
a soldier and avid bird watcher observed vultures sitting on barbwire fences
next to mine fields waiting for gazelles and other herbivores to wander
in and get blown to smithereens.
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- "It gave them a meal that was already ground up,"
said Dr Lefebvre.
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- "The observer mentioned that once in a while a vulture
was caught at its own game and got blown up on a mine."
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- Milk thief
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- Another bird watcher observed a great skua in the Antarctic
who joined in with seal pups feeding on the milk from their mother.
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- Many of the birds that ranked high on the innovation
scale are the least popular with the public.
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- "When you look at published reports on whether people
like birds or don't like birds, they don't correlate well with intelligence,"
said the McGill researcher.
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- "People tend not to like crows, because they have
this fiendish look to them and they're black and they like dead prey. Warblers
and the birds that people tend to like are not the high innovators."
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- But Dr Lefebvre said the scale did not measure how smart
birds were, only how "innovative".
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- "With the word 'smart' you have to have a value
judgment. You can never know whether a bird has been learning by observation
or has figured something out by itself."
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- The work was presented to the annual meeting of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
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- © BBC MMV
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- http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4286965.stm
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