View From The Shed by Shaun Finnie - BIRD BRAIN

BIRD BRAIN

Owls are wise. We're taught that from our earliest picture books. “All the cuddly wuddly forest creatures went to the Wise Old Owl. She would know what to do.” You've probably read something like that to your kids or at least seen it in a Disney movie, right?

Wrong. Owls are stupid, ridiculously so. I've seen owls fly straight into a tree trunk on more than one occasion, they're that dumb. Obviously they're not in the same category as feral pigeons who are so mentally feeble that they sometimes sit in the middle of the road waiting to see if a fast moving car will be their friend, but they're not as 'wise' as childhood fiction (that then becomes adult accepted truth) would have us believe. They certainly can't solve quadratic equations.

Crows, on the other hand, are smart aren't they? We've seen them using tools to get to food in the same way that Chimpanzees do. They can be trained to do tasks for rewards. They even recognise their own reflection. How smart is that?

Well... I used to agree with all of that. After all, everyone knows how intelligent or otherwise certain birds are, don't they. Don't they? After further contemplation and rumination, I don't think that any of the above is true after all.

What set me down this thought-trail was seeing the increasing number of SPOONBILLS at Old Moor recently. How do they know that Old Moor is a good place to hang out for the Summer? I appreciate that they must have seen the site from the air and figured that it looks OK. Massive credit here goes to the Old Moor team and their “Build it and they will come” philosophy. You have to get the environment right if you want to give nature a home, and it looks like they've done just that.

And I guess that the later arriving birds have simply seen the other Spoonies (on the occasions that they weren't hiding in the willows) and dropped in to join them. But the question remains; what was the thought process that made that choice? And why have they stayed so long here instead of continuing on to the thriving Spoonbill colony just a few minutes flight away at RSPB Fairburn Ings?

How does a Cuckoo know that it's time to take to the wing and fly to Africa when it's Dunnock or Reed Warbler foster parents stay at home in the UK? Or indeed how does it recognise a potential mate in another Cuckoo when it's never seen one of its own kind before? Does that make him smart? It seems pretty clever to me.

But back to migration, how do they know when to go, where to go and even if they're able to make it? That urge to fly from one part of the world to another, there and back again year after year, is one of the earth's great mysteries. We know that the position of the sun and/or the moon at certain times of the year play a part in determining which way a bird decides to fly. Memory helps too, as birds have been proven to recognise landmarks and base their direction upon seeing those. Research is also increasingly showing that their sense of smell is a major (perhaps predominant) factor in helping birds with migration and in their everyday lives. Whether that's the odour of each other or their surroundings is difficult to tell right now but the investigation continues.

Many birds also have the ability to see the magnetic fields emanating from our planet's metallic molten core. How do they do this and how does it influence their flightpath? I have no idea and even our brightest scientists aren't really sure.

I think the honest answer to all these questions is, we'll probably never know. The bird's brain and thought process is so very different from our own that we cannot put ourselves in their place and pretend to think their thoughts. They have a completely different set of preferences and limitations that we just can't comprehend it. All they care about is security, warmth, food and reproduction. Their brains are blissfully unencumbered by irrelevances such as, “Why is it that I recognise fewer 'Strictly Come Dancing' celebrities each year?” or “Wouldn't people be much more interested in our Parliament if a liar's pants really did catch fire?”. Our sense of smell and sight is also woefully inferior/different to theirs so we can't even factor in the senses that they're using to process their information. It's something we can only imagine, not having the capability to experience it for ourselves. Trying to compare their decision making to our own is like trying to compare France with Tuesday or Gas Mark 7. It's just too different to try to make sense of.

The simple fact is that birds aren't 'smart', 'clever' or 'stupid'. Each individual species is just perfectly suited to fill the evolutionary niche in which it lives. No more, no less, with nothing wasted. It has adapted (and is continuing to adapt) to make the most of its ecological and social surroundings. It's exactly intelligent enough, in the areas that it needs to be, using the sensory tools available to it, to live its best life. Even feral pigeons.

Wouldn't it be great if we could say that too?