The Genius of Birds

⚡️ 10 Quotes from the book

“A flood of new research has overturned the old views, and people are finally starting to accept that birds are far more intelligent than we ever imagined—in some ways closer to our primate relatives than to their reptilian ones.”

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“Tempting as it may be to interpret the behavior of other animals in terms of human mental processes, it’s perhaps even more tempting to reject the possibility of kinship. It’s what primatologist Frans de Waal calls “anthropodenial,” blindness to the humanlike characteristics of other species.”

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“If one of the species you’re using in your experiment fails every test you give it, the problem may be you, the researcher, not the animal. You may have failed to understand what is relevant to the way a bird sees the world.”

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“I love this idea, that nature dreamed up the same kind of sleep in both humans and birds, fostering the growth of big brains in creatures so far apart on life’s tree.”

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“We are a naming species, and what we call things influences the way we think about them and the experiments we deem worthy of doing.”

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“Every forest has its own character, its own whispered rumors and smells.”

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“If cognition is defined as the mechanisms by which a bird acquires, processes, stores, and uses information, then song learning is clearly a cognitive task: A young bird picks up information about how a song should sound by listening to tutors of its own species.”

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“Your memory of a thought is married to the place in which it first occurred to you.”

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“Birds are facing change on a scale unknown in their evolutionary history. This is a result of the Anthropocene—the new epoch of man-made change that is contributing to what has been called the sixth mass extinction.”

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“If you’re going to invade a new place, a love of novelty helps. So does a fondness for hanging out in groups.”

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