I am reading The Genius of Birds, by Jennifer Ackerman, and it is almost as incredible as The Hidden Life of Trees. Almost, because birds are animals. I still haven’t gotten over trees that make years-long fruit-producing plans, keep Grandpa Stump on life support, and kill antelopes.

Birds are also amazing. I haven’t finished the book, and already birds can

• Recognize human faces, including human emotional expressions, remember those humans for years, and describe those humans to each other;
• Create useful, complex tools from another bird’s template, teach their offspring how to make these tools, and retain a favorite tool for years;
• Count, compute, and make decisions based on empirical probability, that last more readily than humans do;
• Discern between painting styles such as Impressionism and Cubism, and sort paintings by whether they contain human figures.

Not to mention solving multi-step problems, remembering hundreds of songs and cache locations, rapidly orienting to their location on Earth from random starting points, and going on strike to protest inequality.

Birds is a short word with a large meaning. It’s a taxonomic Class, meaning there are not only multiple species, there are multiple Genera, Families, and Orders. Our taxonomic Class is Mammalia, so saying birds are smart is like saying mammals are smart, though there are about twice as many species of birds as of mammals.

So some birds are smarter than others, and some are smart in some areas and dim in others.

This book is slightly annoying in that the author both derides and engages in anthropomorphism repeatedly. I remember encountering scientific anthropomorphism in high school, when I became interested in ethology. I thought I would become a scientist, and at first I embraced the idea that attributing human emotions to animals demonstrated a lack of objectivity. As I continued to read case studies, though, it seemed patently obvious that animals do have emotions, and I wondered why it was considered objective to deny that.

Over the years, plenty of scientists have observed animal emotions, from Charles Darwin to Jane Goodall, and scientific anthropomorphism is in decline today, though not expunged. Convincing evidence includes that fact that all mammals, including humans, have corresponding brain regions for emotional response, as well as identical associated neurochemicals.

No one who has owned a pet dog will need convincing.

Humans separated from birds, or rather, dinosaurs, much longer ago, but Mother Nature has a very long memory, and current bird scientists have identified a lot of similarities between bird brains and our brains as well. Speaking of bird brains, they get a bad rap because they are small, but their neuronal density is quite high. Birds’ brains are large in proportion to their body sizes, just as ours are.

I know it marks me as a hopeless snowflake, but I feel we are still learning so much about our world, and there is so much we don’t really understand. How can we so casually destroy it? Offshore drilling is on my mind this week.