12

Which native birds are smart?

The previous chapters identified topics of special interest to cognitive science and Australian bird species were discussed under these headings. It is now important to put all the information together and provide some perspective as to whether there is some evidence that some Australian birds may be especially smart and perhaps even why and whether birds with specific cognitive abilities fall into several specific families or clades. In other words, it is now time to see which birds have emerged in this ‘talent search’ of Australian birds.

As discussed in Chapter 1, Australia as a continent had something to do with the way birds evolved, but throughout the book the continent, its geological history, its location and climate have almost completely faded from view as the emphasis was on the birds. It partly has to stay in the background out of professional courtesy to the experts in geology and ecology. One is not giving away any secrets by saying that Australia is the driest, and flattest continent, has overwhelmingly nutrient-poor soil and more sand plains and dunefields in its arid zones than even the Sahara (Orians and Milewski 2007).

However, the climate, while it has changed considerably over time, was never really very cold (except for a period well before the evolution of birds and mammals). Despite the various temperature zones on the continent (temperate, subtropical, tropical), daytime temperatures generally do not go below freezing anywhere on the continent, except in the few high mountain regions of Eastern Australia and have not done so for most of Australia’s past geological history during the evolution of vertebrates and birds. During the Cretaceous period, Antarctica was frost free and records show that, 85 million years ago, modern Gondwanan birds were already well represented and flowering plants thrived in subtropical climates on Antarctica and Australia (Francis et al. 2008). The earliest continental-scale ice sheets formed around 34 million years ago, growing from local ice caps centred on mountain massifs but taking their time to gain their present dimensions only 13.5 million years ago, at a time when the Australian continent had already shifted well away from the cooling South Pole to nearer its present position (Jamieson and Sugden 2008). Climate change in the Pleistocene (lasting from about 2.5 million to 11 700 years ago) was specifically marked by a drying of the continent (Kearns et al. 2010) and by then all modern continents were about in their current location.

Except for the Great Dividing Range on the eastern seaboard, there are few elevations exceeding 300 m in altitude and winds are unimpeded carrying top soil away. Except for the top of the continent, much of Australia suffers long periods of drought but, unpredictably and very occasionally, it is the recipient of such heavy rainfalls that the vast dry riverbeds flowing inland fill and then may take months to silently flood the plains even many hundreds of kilometres away from the source of the rain (Fig. 12.1). These floodwaters inundate large portions of flat land for long periods, leaching nutrients in the process. Lake Eyre in the north-west of South Australia fills approximately once in 60 years. The Birdsville Track, once called the Diamantina Crossing, is in corner country just across the Queensland border (not far from Northern Territory, South Australia and New South Wales) and one of the most remote and mostly desolate and forbidding places in Australia, flanked by large seemingly endless deserts. Yet, when we visited there, the river was full of water and so wide that it needed a boat to cross and birdlife was everywhere (Fig. 12.2), which was rare and special. In general, life for plants and for the animals can be very tough – just finding water may be a constant challenge, growth of grasses, plants and fruiting can be fickle. The ability of flight may not be enough for escape. In very hot and rainless years, inland budgerigars have been known to simply drop from the sky and die. In years when rodents and rabbits are in short supply or breed late in the season, even birds of prey can be found exhausted and emaciated on the ground, no longer able to fly.

Fig. 12.1. The Channel Country in outback Australia. This region has a network of rivers and lakes, which can be dry for decades until it rains somewhere else and slowly fills the dry riverbeds. Once they overflow and flood surrounding areas, as in 2010 above and also in 2012, roads are cut for months and the ground is not even traversable on foot – ankle-deep or knee-deep yellowish mud as far as the eye can see. (A) A map of the area; (B) The Birdsville Track is closed (note the remaining bits of outline of the track – nearly everything is under water); (C) Lake Eyre from a small aircraft – the lake is slowly filling, encrusted salt on the left slowly getting dissolved by the rising water.

Fig. 12.2. Flooding in Birdsville. This is a short distance from the Birdsville Hotel, located at the edge of the Simpson Desert, 1600 km due west of Brisbane and is normally just surrounded by sand. After rain, some thousand kilometres away, the river flows and the birds arrive from everywhere. This is a rare sight of a desert scene in flood. Coordinates: 25°53′56″S 139°21′06″E.

In addition to these climate and landscape features, another distinguishing factor is that, except for bats, Australia has no native placental mammals. New Zealand, which split off from Gondwana around 85 million years ago – much earlier than Australia split from the Antarctic – had no placental mammals at all. There were no monkeys, squirrels, rabbits, cats or rats, no ungulates, bears, boars or other carnivores such as ferrets, stoats or foxes. Australia developed its own megafauna, and even large carnivorous marsupials for a time, but this happened long after bird species had diversified in East Gondwana. However, it has often been said that other classes of animals fill the ecological niches that eutherian mammals would otherwise have filled. Whether such niche filling is related to developing special cognitive skills is arguably too speculative, but indirectly it may not be. Facing no significant mammalian competition in some ecological niches, exploration might have been more daring, more widespread and more diverse, and those actions, in turn, might have promoted a larger brain, and from this all other consequences might have followed. A very different argument might say that, because the vast expanses of land and the unreliable rainfalls and plant growth made survival difficult, one invention was to band together in groups, travel together and look out for each other. Any person travelling in the outback today would have noticed that, apart from raptors, birds will always occur in groups. Even some raptor species remain in close proximity to each other. Countering this argument is that, as said in Chapter 3, most cooperative species tend to be insectivorous species with the highest concentrations in Eastern Australia (Ford et al. 1988), thus in areas with some rainfall and relatively moderate temperatures. Distribution patterns can change over time, of course, but today there does not appear to be an obvious link between cooperation and aridity.

The non-songbirds

A great many Australian bush birds have been discussed in this book. They fall roughly into songbirds and non-songbirds, and together they make up roughly two-thirds of all avian species in Australia. The investigation into the cognitive behaviour of Australian birds has thus been cast very widely. Yet when one looks at the evidence presented by orders and groups to which some special qualities had been attributed, the list shrinks considerably.

In sequence of orders, non-song birds mentioned in previous chapters include cassowaries and emus (Struthioniformes), bush turkeys (Craciformes), kingfishers, kookaburras and bee-eaters (Coraciiformes), cuckoos (Cuculiformes), owls, frogmouths, nightjars (Strigiformes), and some birds of prey (infraorder Falconides) including ospreys, hawks, falcons, eagles and also kites. The reason why many of them received only fleeting mention is because we generally know very little of their cognitive abilities.

The cassowary, confined to small coastal areas in Queensland, is now protected and has a good deal of community support, but is endangered partly because around 75% of their habitat has been lost (Kofron and Chapman 2006) and fragmented, and they experience high mortality rates. Fifty-five per cent of their death rate is attributed to vehicles, another is interference by introduced feral pigs that not only destroy their nests and eggs but compete for the same food sources. Natural catastrophes, of which Australia has many, now also seriously affect the survival of this species. For instance, Cyclone Yasi in February 2011 devastated cassowary habitat in the hinterland of Mission Beach. It was reported that this single event was threatening the survival of as many as 10% of all remaining southern cassowaries (Maynard 2011). The body to brain weight ratio in cassowaries is particularly small and there is no way to suggest that greater behavioural or social flexibility would help their survival. The very high incidence of road accidents is at least remarkable and suggests little to no adaptation to risks associated with cars, as ravens have been shown to do (Verweij et al. 2010). This has not been studied. We now have very good information about cassowaries’ physical needs and habitat requirements but little to nothing about behavioural traits that might also assist in their survival. We should also be studying what decisions these unusual birds might make in response to the many problems that face them, how they respond to specific stressors and whether they can be trained to choose behaviour that will give them new, and perhaps even innovative, survival options. This is certainly a way in which cognitive studies may add valuable information to the attempts to save species.

Among other non-songbirds discussed were the kookaburras and tawny frogmouths and the tool using of some birds of prey. Kookaburras have also been discussed because they are cooperative, spend some time in actively teaching their young, and have a large number of feather and body posture signals that seem to contribute to regulating group life. Kookaburras communicate extensively using body postures, feather positions and vocal signals and they have, as have tawny frogmouths, been seen engaging in object play (Watson 1992). Moreover, kookaburras have been known to find innovative nesting solutions when nest holes are in short supply.

Birds of prey

Information or even anecdotal evidence of complex cognitive behaviour in Australian birds of prey is noticeable scant. While tireless efforts have gone into the breeding biology and ecology in birds that may be vulnerable, a sense of urgency and need to know where raptors are nesting and reproducing has perhaps led to a relative neglect of studies in cognition worldwide. The tool using in black-breasted buzzards is well known. The nest building of the osprey was mentioned, and for the black kite, at least those living in Australia, many anecdotal pieces of evidence exist that put them on par with the corvids and some psittacine species because they use tools, play and show innovative feeding behaviour: all clear signs of behavioural flexibility and cognitive abilities as established in primates (Montgomery 2014). However, ospreys and black kites are widely distributed across the world, just as goshawks and peregrine falcons are. In Australia, peregrine falcons have very occasionally been seen hunting cooperatively and so have wedge-tailed eagles. In one case, even caching behaviour in a peregrine falcon pair was reported. Wedge-tailed eagles were also described as using branches as insect or fly repellents and I once watched wedge-tailed eagle parents teaching their youngster how to get its quarry. Again, such information is anecdotal but, that it happens at all, shows some degree of flexibility and deliberate communication with another bird.

Pigeons and doves

Much more could be made of the Order Columbiformes to which all pigeons and doves belong, even though some very useful publications exist (Shields and Crome 1992). Pigeons have been used in perceptual, especially visual, and behavioural research for many decades and have proven to be tremendously perceptive and quick learners. Indeed, much research in experimental and comparative psychology has relied either on the chicken or the pigeon as a model (Fig. 12.3), as also outlined in the previous chapter. Yet, ‘tainted’ as they seem to be by domestication, there has barely been an attempt to transfer the insights of these experiments to native species and wildlife research.

Strangely, Australian native pigeons are often not embraced with the same enthusiasm as other native animals, and rather little has been done in terms of experimental research. In the laboratory, usually only the domesticated pigeon Columba livia, once just at home around the Mediterranean and extending to parts of Asia, has been used.

As described in the previous chapter, Australia has currently 24 species of doves and pigeons, three of which are introduced, including the domestic pigeon (or feral or rock pigeon), and two species of turtle-dove. Some of the native pigeons have extraordinary colours and life styles. The topknot pigeon (Fig. 12.4) and the wompoo pigeon (Fig. 12.5) are the largest and perhaps the most elusive (and, dare I say, beautiful).

There are others that are now also rarely seen such as the emerald dove, the rose-crowned fruit-dove, or the superb fruit-dove. Given their phylogenetic relationship to the feral (rock) pigeon, it is possible that they share with them some of the extraordinary perceptual capabilities but they simply have not been tested and we know relatively little about their lives today, let alone their cognitive abilities. We do not hear much about them either and this is certainly not a new complaint. Gilbert wrote in 1936 in his introduction to a detailed paper on topknot pigeons:

Fig. 12.3. Rigorous perceptual and cognitive laboratory research in psychology and comparative psychology has been conducted on chickens and pigeons for well over five decades, but somehow the cognitive research on birds reported in the last decade is largely disconnected from the work on chickens and pigeons, among the first modern birds to evolve in Gondwana in the early Cretaceous period. Their domestication has probably led to the view that their abilities are a result of ongoing interactions with humans. Yet the methods used and the rich literature offer significant insights into the perceptual abilities of these birds, and perhaps birds generally. Australia’s many, and often very colourful, pigeons have never been studied for any of the perceptual skills, so no comparisons can be made to date.

Fig. 12.4. The topknot pigeon is both odd and impressive looking with its reddish-brown mane and a crest, a red beak and red eyes on an otherwise mostly grey body up to 50 cm in size. The eyes are set back further than in most birds and the feathers below the neck form a collar that can be erected. They are canopy dwellers and rarely descend to the lower levels of trees unless there are berries or fruit available, but we have never seen them near or on the ground. (Photograph by Lou Rozensteins, Brisbane (contact at Pbase.com).)

Fig. 12.5. The wompoo fruit-dove is among the largest members of the family of Columbidae in the world (up to 55 cm), even larger than the topknot pigeon and towers over the feral pigeon of about 33 cm. The stark colour contrasts (especially of purple chest and yellow abdomen) are as marked above. The wompoo fruit-dove shares its forest environment with several other rainforest species in the family, such as the superb fruit-dove, rose-crowned fruit-dove, topknot pigeon, white-headed pigeon, brown cuckoo-dove and emerald dove. All live in a very narrow coastal strip of Eastern Australia, from Cape York in the north to the southern border of New South Wales, but largely concentrated in the narrow subtropical and tropical strips of forest from the mid-north coast (Coffs Harbour) to Rockhampton and then in patches from Townsville to the ancient Daintree forests north of Cooktown, the oldest rainforest in the world, with the largest number of extant ‘Gondwana’ plants still growing in the forest. The wompoo’s vocalisations are unmistakable – very low frequency calls (umms), literally sounding like the word ‘wompoo’.

The beautiful and various forms of Australian Pigeons are a continual source of attraction to the ornithologist, and, of all the Orders which grace our forests, woodlands and plains, it would be difficult to name one that exceeds in general interest that of the Columbiformes. In habits some are mainly terrestrial, others arboreal … Their beauty of form and colour, and their adaptations to different modes of living, present such wide gradations, that the field student becomes dismayed at his inefficiency in giving an adequate portrayal of their life histories. The constant persecution of our indigenous Pigeons, however, has reduced their numbers to such an extent, that it now seems impossible to avert the extinction of some forms that were once actually numerous. The absolute abuse of the productivity of Nature is no better exemplified than in the extermination, now proceeding, of that exceedingly handsome Pigeon, the Topknot. Persons who know little of, and care less for, the unique inhabitants of our bush, still pursue this noble bird upon which to waste their powder and shot’ (Gilbert 1936).

Indeed, when Captain Cook arrived in Australia, flocks of thousands of topknot pigeons were reported. Today one is lucky to see groups of 2–8 topknot pigeons grace the sky and then usually only in those remnant rainforest pockets where its feeding needs can still be met for a few weeks per year. Gilbert’s comments are still relevant today, although it is now largely habitat loss, particularly loss of native fruiting plants and wild figs that are needed to sustain topknot pigeons.

Cockatoos, parrots and lorikeets

By contrast, evidence of the life histories of parrots and cockatoos are relatively well known and quite a number of patterns of very smart behaviour has been documented (often only in captivity though). Unlike canopy parrots elsewhere, Australian and New Zealand parrots may live on the ground or in trees, feed on nectar or fruit, live diurnally or nocturnally and, as the New Zealand kea, even at alpine altitudes.

A 2008 study places the evolution of parrots firmly into Gondwana and into the Cretaceous period – probably around 90 million years ago – allowing plenty of time to adapt and evolve into new species, and to allow New Zealand to take some psittacine species ‘on board’ when it finally split from Gondwana some 85 million years ago (Wright et al. 2008; White et al. 2011).

Cockatoos may have filled the niche occupied by monkeys in other continents: at least their brain size is comparable with that of monkeys and the niches they occupy and their foraging styles are also similar. The long-billed corella of southern Australia can use its bill for the extraction of tubers, and the galah regularly uproots small carrot-like plants for their nourishing roots. The yellow-tailed black-cockatoo and the sulphur-crested cockatoo also regularly extract beetle larvae from the layer under tree bark. This is called ‘extractive foraging’ and, in primates, is regarded as a complex cognitive task.

The body to brain weight ratio of cockatoos is the highest of any birds in Australia and they rank near the top of the ‘brainiest’ animals (such as dolphins, great apes) and alongside ravens and crows of any continent.

The palm cockatoo, a bird thought of as possessing superior intelligence and longevity, is the bird so far known to have the highest brain to body weight ratio among Australian birds (Franklin et al. 2014). Indeed, if one were to go by this measure alone, palm cockatoos would have to be considered as the most outstanding and brightest birds of all Australian birds, and possibly worldwide. They are also representatives of one of the most ancient groups of birds. Astonishingly, a recent study found the smallest of all parrots, the budgerigar, ranks as highly as the palm cockatoo in body to brain ratio (Franklin et al. 2014).

The entire group of cockatoos, especially the galah and the two corella species (little and long-billed) all have high ratios compared with other families and clades. In the chapter on tool use, the palm cockatoo’s unique use of tools was described in detail, drumming with one foot using a stick in a hollowed out part of a branch to enhance percussion effects. More importantly in terms of the international literature on cognition and tool use in birds, palm cockatoos manufacture and use sticks as building material and tools, as was described in Chapter 4, and may take their tools and fly with them to new locations.

To my knowledge, there have been no detailed cognitive studies on any of the Australian cockatoos. Arguably, they are probably the smartest and, apart from macaws, also the most long-lived birds in the world today (see Appendix 1) and yet, for a whole host of reasons, these enquiries have rarely happened.

Despite these glaring omissions, several theoretical frameworks have been developed in evolutionary biology, comparative psychology and cognitive sciences on the basis of a few species largely based in the northern hemisphere, with the exception of some lonely ambassadors from the southern hemisphere: one from New Caledonia (the crow); another from New Zealand (the kea); and a third from Africa (the African grey parrot).

Parakeets/budgerigars

Of the two species (the largest and the smallest in the psittacine family), the budgerigar has been tested for its long-term memory, astute discrimination and memory of sounds and for its extraordinary ability to mimic both vocally and in body actions, as discussed in Chapter 7. It also occurs in flocks and that has generated new research into the function of song sharing in flocks of budgerigars with varying composition (Dahlin et al. 2014).

Budgerigars, as other parrots, belong to the group of birds that learn their vocalisations even though they are not songbirds. The mimicry and the charm of the bird have secured this species a place as the most popular pet bird worldwide, but in the wild it occurs only in Australia. Wild budgerigars (weighing 30–40 g, see Table 12.1) have a light green and yellow plumage colour, are seed-eaters (but also feed on fruit and greens, including vegetables), pair bond, and they are opportunistic breeders, breeding in nest hollows, usually as part of larger flocks (Wyndham 1981, 1982). Males and females can be distinguished by the colour of the cere (the area containing the nostrils): blue in adult males, pale brown to white in adult females (Marshall 2009). The plumage fluoresces under ultraviolet light. This phenomenon is thought to be related to courtship and mate selection (Pearn et al. 2001, 2003), but the throat spots, which also reflect ultraviolet light, may be used to distinguish between individual birds. Budgerigars have tetrachromatic colour vision (via four classes of cone cells) and generally very fine discrimination of hues and intensity (Goldsmith and Butler 2005).

In previous chapters it was pointed out that budgerigars have a particularly good memory and extraordinary powers of discrimination of sounds, tested in levels of perception of degraded vocalisations (Park and Dooling 1986). Budgerigars are found throughout the drier inland parts of Australia and the species has survived these harsh conditions probably for many millions of years. Therefore one wonders whether their acute hearing is an adaptation to wind conditions in the outback (almost permanent wind across the plains) that attenuate sounds very rapidly.

Auditory perception in budgerigars was examined in the context of musical sounds and musical ability. They were tested to see whether they are capable of distinguishing intervals of a third, fourth and fifth and can memorise a tune and transpose it to another key. They could and were able to do so up to four octaves. Moreover they could distinguish and remember auditory cues no more than 1 or 2 Hz apart (Knecht 1939). Budgerigars were conditioned to recognise one specific call as a food call. On completion of this training, the birds were meant to be confused by being presented with sounds that embedded the specific food call in a series of known and unknown sequences of sounds of songs. The birds were able to identify the food call every time, despite the scramble (Knecht 1939). These findings suggest that auditory communication in birds may well be extremely subtle and complex and that the avian ear (not necessarily of all species) may well be capable of very fine discriminations.

Table 12.1. Life history data of budgerigars

Type of nest	Tree hollow/log
No of eggs	4–8
Type of hatching	Asynchronous
Incubation (days)	18–20 days
Hatch	Altricial (blind, naked, eyes open day 10)
Fledge	5th week
Weaning	6–8 weeks
Territory	Nomadic
Lifespan	13–15 years

From the 1970s and through to the 1990s, substantial research efforts were made to understand auditory perception in birds, largely using zebra finches (Hashino and Okanoya 1989) and budgerigars (Dooling and Saunders 1975; Dooling 1982; Okanoya and Dooling 1987). These modern studies have confirmed the auditory sensitivity, outstanding perceptual abilities and auditory memory specifically in the budgerigar (Dooling et al. 1995; Farabaugh et al. 1992). It was discovered that budgerigars are capable of distinguishing sounds stimulating one ear from sounds stimulating the other ear (called large free-field binaural unmasking) – an ability that had been documented before only in animals with much larger heads (Dent et al. 1997). They are also able to classify a large number of types of contact calls and can remember these for up to several months (Park and Dooling 1985, 1986). The best signal-to-noise ratio attained by the budgerigar auditory system is in a narrow spectral region of 2–4 kHz. The unusually sensitive hearing of budgerigars (called critical ratio function), compared with that of other birds and mammals, is characteristic of the species and not a result of domestication or selective breeding (Farabaugh et al. 1998). This is both remarkable in terms of its perceptual ability as well as confirmation of a very large memory: both relatively rare qualities among all animal classes. It is of relevance to musical ability once thought to be unique to humans (see Kaplan 2009).

There are two comments that are important to make here. The first is that budgerigars are not songbirds. It is easy to see why songbirds may have ‘musical’ abilities, but non-songbirds such as parrots would not appear to need such an ability. It is still not clear why budgerigars have developed an extraordinary auditory perception and memory of sounds. However, new studies are being conducted that suggest that the cognitive abilities of budgerigars may far exceed memory for sounds and their mimicked reproduction. Judging by the findings about the characteristics of warble song in budgerigars, it is now claimed that budgerigars have the rudiments of syntax (Tu and Dooling 2012). Semantics refers to sounds and utterances that are marked as having specific and unaltered meaning, while syntax refers to putting semantic units together in a sequence that creates meaning. To be able to have the rudiments of syntax would be a cognitively very advanced behaviour that so far has been thought to be a unique trait of human language and well beyond the capacity of any birds.

Secondly, the perceptual abilities of the budgerigars are also exceptional. This seems to confirm the argument reported in the previous chapter that the evolution in brain size concerned largely the perceptual apparatus.

In Chapter 3, it was mentioned that budgerigars have remarkable abilities in imitation learning and retain a plastic brain (Galef et al. 1986; Young 2011) and they, as do all other psittacine species, learn vocalisation just as songbirds do. Their ability to mimic has been confirmed repeatedly. In 1994, one budgerigar, named Puck, was listed in the 1995 edition of Guinness World Records and has been so ever since. No other bird has broken the record of this male budgerigar, which had a vocabulary of 1728 English words (Folkard et al. 2004). The latest favourite, called Disco, appeared in the social media in 2013 with more than 6 million hits within a month of being posted on YouTube. None of these records specify whether the birds have used any of these words or complete sentences in any meaningful way, as Alex the African Grey Parrot was shown to do (Pepperberg 1999, 2006c, 2007). Unfortunately, all those instances of finding speech in parrots do not necessarily lead us to be able to conclude that the birds had associated specific meanings with the human words, nor do we have a way of knowing whether speaking budgerigars ever rearranged their words or put words in a new context. Even if this cognitive feat is found to be beyond the budgerigar, it is very remarkable that a bird of such a small size, and brain, can memorise such a large vocabulary.

Visual perception appears to be similarly extraordinary in budgerigars. From the studies we have so far, it seems that budgerigars use that ability of fine discrimination within their own groups (Hile and Striedter 2000; Hile et al. 2000, 2005). Another aspect of budgerigar behaviour is their play behaviour. They swing run, skid, tumble, hang upside down and do so specifically as adults.

Altogether, then, budgerigars may be remarkable but they are not a good example to support the theory that innovation ‘drives’ evolution of brain expansion or that cooperation requires more complex interactions. Budgerigars do not build nests, nor do they cooperate. They pair bond but, by itself, this is not convincing evidence because this applies to over 80% of all birds worldwide without all of them having notably large brains.

However, the landscape itself may provide some clues. In such harsh environments as the Australian outback, spatial memory and vocal recognition of one’s partner would be essential. In a relatively featureless environment it would also be very easy to get lost and never find another waterhole in time. To my knowledge, the size of the hippocampus in outback birds, or specifically in the budgerigar, has not been measured. For their size, budgerigars are long-lived (13–15 years) about twice as long as birds of similar size in the northern hemisphere (Table 12.1; see also Appendix 1). In this regard, they fulfil the hypothesis that growing a big brain is marked by high energy costs, a slowing down of development and in need of longer-term parental or group care, leading to a longer lifespan.

The passerines

The perching birds make up the majority of existing birds but it is interesting that among all songbirds, subdivided until now into parvorders ‘Corvida’ and ‘Passerida’ (Sibley and Ahlquist 1990), almost every single species about which some cognitive facts are known, or have been experimentally determined, and have been described in this book belong to the Parvorder of ‘Corvida’. This large group contains the lyrebirds, bowerbirds and fairy-wrens, the honeyeaters, shrike-tits, drongos, magpie-larks, flycatchers, fantails, cuckoo-shrikes, orioles, birds of paradise, woodswallows, magpies, butcherbirds, mud nesters, crows and allies as outlined in Chapter 1 (Fig. 1.5). Clearly, this group has centre-stage in cooperative species, in tool use and many other attributes that, together, suggest advanced cognitive development. Among them are the innovators in food extraction, such as the shrike-tits, and the many outstanding mimics, chief of which are the lyrebirds and the magpies, undoubtedly ranking top of the list (Fig. 12.6).

Recent decades have produced a wealth of information about ravens and crows that has astounded the world. To reiterate, from the discovery of episodic memory in a variety of corvids to the play behaviour, empathy and negotiated alliances within their groups to problem solving and complex levels of communication (Fraser and Bugnyar 2010 a,b; Bugnyar 2011; Fraser and Bugnyar 2011; Braun et al. 2012), it is clear that most corvids, especially crows and ravens, rank among the most intelligent birds, and even among the smartest animals generally (Bednekoff et al. 1997; Bugnyar and Heinrich 2005; Clayton and Dickinson 1999; Heinrich 2000; Marzluff and Angell 2005). They have been shown to be on par with great apes and, quite often, their performance is at a level of 3- to 5-year-old children (Emery and Clayton 2004). From the southern hemisphere, the one well-studied corvid (the New Caledonian crow) astounded the world with its tool use and manufacture of tools (Hunt 1996, 2000; Hunt et al. 2006; Taylor et al. 2010, 2012) and in Australia, the Torresian crow and the currawong have impressed onlookers when their feeding innovation of handling poisonous cane toads was discovered, as reported in this book. Importantly, Rowley noted in 1973 that the behaviour of Australian ravens closely resembles that of the species most studied overseas, C. corax and C. frugilegus (Rowley 1973) and, while one must not presume that the Australian species are ab ovo of the same intelligence as those studied in Europe, the United States and New Caledonia, it is a reasonable hypothesis on which planned cognitive projects of Australian corvids could be built. Australian currawongs (Prawiradilaga 1994) and ravens (Rowley 1973) have been shown to also engage in caching behaviour, as has been studied in detail in species in North America and Europe, although here such abilities have gone almost unnoticed.

The currawong, indeed the family of Artamidae (to which currawongs, butcherbirds, woodswallows and magpies belong), has been traced back to at least 20 million years and all members of this family have thrived (Kearns et al. 2013). Indeed, currawongs are highly important for the wellbeing and continued existence of Australian flora on two accounts. Firstly, they feed on forest pests, specifically on stick insects (Phasmatodea: Phasmatidae), Didymuria violescens, Ctenomorphodes tessulatus and Podocanthus wilkinsoni (Readshaw 1968; Bass 1989, 1990, 1995). These species are found in most eucalypt forests but occasionally there are outbreaks that completely defoliate the forests (Ohmart 1991). Total defoliation can cause severe stem growth reduction (Mazanec 1967) and, eventually, can cause more than 80% mortality of the forest stand (Neumann and Marks 1976). Without currawongs, and other animals that may feed at the level at which stick insects live in trees, forests would be doomed. Secondly, currawongs are one of the main dispersers of seeds for native plants, as are emus and cassowaries (bats are the main pollinators). Without them, many native plants would soon go extinct. Moreover, currawongs are intelligent, resourceful, adaptable and utterly loveable (affectionate, patient and accommodating – those who have raised one or two will know what I mean) yet, apart from the anecdotal evidence gleaned from hand-raising some individuals, we have no knowledge of their perceptual abilities, their spatial and episodic memory, for instance.

Fig. 12.6. Innovative birds. (A) Australian raven and, inserted, Torresian crow – the two species are very similar in appearance. The Torresian crow is heavier in build and has a broader and squarer tail. However, the two species barely overlap; (B) palm cockatoo; (C) budgerigar; (D) galah; (E) kookaburra (the largest kingfisher); (F) sulphur-crested cockatoo; (G) Australian magpie. Although the sulphur-crested cockatoo has only been appreciated as a pet, it has rarely been tested for its wide-ranging abilities. It shows a responsiveness to companions and a playfulness that scientists now know is a mark of intelligence. Apart from the zebra finch, the Australia magpie is probably the most studied bird in Australia. It impresses not only because of its unusual, beautiful and versatile song, but also because a good deal of robust evidence suggests that it is one of the smartest birds in Australia, on a par with the smartest in the world.

Butcherbirds and especially magpies, both of which belong to the same family as currawongs, have been discussed in great detail throughout the book. We have extensive research data on song in both butcherbirds and magpies, and, in magpies, also on a range of cognitive abilities, including extensive play behaviour, mimicry and the unusual ability to engage in pointing behaviour once thought to have been exclusive to humans and great apes.

Birds in the old parvorder of Corvida (see Fig. 1.5), despite enormous variety in life histories and size, seem to have a number of things in common. Indeed, innovations of tool use, food versatility, complexity of communication, complexity of social life and proactive defence of territory (mobbing of potential predators or invaders) are particularly strongly developed in the Corvida. As different as, for instance, bowerbirds and magpies may appear, flexibility, alertness and a general sense of making the best use of the environment makes them highly successful. In this regard, even the much smaller and more vulnerable fairy-wrens and fantails show flexibility and innovativeness and they have the same feistiness and self-assured presentation. They will also fearlessly mob any intruders.

Remarkably, in this parvorder we also find that cooperative behaviour dominates and, at the same time, it also contains the largest number of thieves and cheats – be this among the bowerbird juveniles stealing building material from each other, while cheating on partners is raised to an art form in fairy-wrens by having secret male meeting areas for extra-pair copulations (Cockburn et al. 2009). Stealing food (kleptoparasitism) is a widespread phenomenon in birds and primates (Brockmann and Barnard 1979; cf. review Morand-Ferron et al. 2007), but it appears that there is a strong relationship between forebrain size and incidence of stealing food, whether as a covert activity, such as trickery or observing another bird hiding food and then stealing it when the caching bird has gone, or in open confrontation forcing others to give up their food. The latter is rare in passerines (but not in sea- and shorebirds) and the most unusual observations of cooperative hunting in a passerine species has been recorded in dusky woodswallows in the wheatbelt of Western Australia. Here two dusky woodswallows collaborated as a team when a restless flycatcher caught a larva and was perched on a branch. One woodswallow flew above the restless flycatcher, vocalising, while the second one simultaneously flew at the distracted flycatcher, snatching the larva from its beak. Still more remarkably, the one that fetched the larva did not eat it but gave it to the one that had distracted the flycatcher (Fulton 2005). Because this was not the only observation made of dusky woodswallows hunting together in this manner, the idea of this being just casual, accidental or opportunistic has to be revised. Premeditated acts such as these require strategy and thinking ahead, and hence cognitive ability.

Then there are the close-knit cooperative white-winged choughs (Fig. 12.7) with their many innovations in feeding strategies and food choices and their extremely slow development, taking longer to mature sexually (4 years) than most other animals in any order, with a few exception of some primates. Despite their cohesiveness (and perhaps because of it) there is a darker side to their cooperation. They can turn into street gangs, sending out scouts to destroy magpie-lark nests and even nests of other choughs in their own group. They steal youngsters from other groups and there are helpers at the nest that pretend to help when they do not. On the good side, they are also highly innovative in food procurement (see Chapters 3 and 10) and all of those behavioural characteristics combined strongly suggest highly evolved cognitive abilities. It would be interesting to see how any of the observed behaviour in the field would be confirmed in controlled experiments.

Fig. 12.7. The white-winged chough, which belongs to a family of mud nesters (which includes the apostlebird), is a cooperative breeder. In a resting state, none of its white secondary flight feathers show – they are revealed only in flight or display, as shown in Fig. 10.4.

Interestingly, bowerbirds, which are not cooperative breeders, nevertheless have social characteristics that appear reminiscent of ‘living together’, even if that does not amount to cooperation. While the males are highly competitive, they are not loners. Indeed, they hang around each other at all times. Young males visit adult bowers, some youngsters form groups and jointly build one bower and, even more dramatic, is the rate of theft and pilfering from each other. Some adult males simply destroy the bower of an opponent but others have learned to take advantage of a competitor’s building materials, steal them and put these into their own bower. In great bowerbirds, the rate of decoration theft was established as 0.38±0.34 decorations stolen per day; and bower destruction of 0.6±1.3 (Doerr 2009b). These rates are similar to those recorded in other bowerbird species (reviewed in Frith and Frith 2004). This intense importance of the bower, the mutual watching and judging of bowers and the materials used for its overall effect, are very remarkable qualities. Bowerbirds spend a good part of the year worrying about their bowers. Males build bowers between June and September, and most copulations occur between September and December (Frith et al. 1996; Frith and Frith 2004). That is, for about half the year the bower is the focal point for males: what materials to get, how to safeguard them from competitors and how to make the best possible impression. They notice the smallest change in their bower, even the disappearance of a single item. This requires excellent memory and a sense of proportion, colour and perspective, even tool use, as has been demonstrated in many studies, as discussed in Chapters 4, 5 and 10.

Fig. 12.8. An adult female satin bowerbird carrying a small shiny green leaf. This female usually appears in our garden accompanied by 8–15 other females. Carrying an item of interest also leads to spontaneous chases by others. Could this be play behaviour (see Chisholm 1916)? It is at times difficult to tell male juveniles and adult females apart because the plumage may be very similar and mistakes are possible. However, young males tend to have more grey-toned legs than females, which tend to be a pale grey/pink.

If they were primates, we would call it culture and consider the artefacts to be of highly symbolic value. As was described in Chapter 5, the bower is more than a mere adaptation. Artistic qualities, tool use and judgement, as well as resourcefulness in finding the right tools and objects, add up to something demanding higher cognition. Females seem to know this because they choose the smartest of the males: the best at problem solving, of which his bower is one important manifestation (Keagy et al. 2009).

Females have so far been excluded in descriptions of bowerbird culture but it is probably incorrect to describe it as a male culture. From own observations, females seem to play with each other as adults and they do so by carrying small, but often unusual items in their beak: an act which is almost always followed by a chase taken up by another female member of the group. This occurs outside the breeding season and has been observed regularly during fieldwork (Fig. 12.8).

A great percentage of psittacine species and even several of the ‘Corvida’ engage in play behaviour. Montgomery (2014) argued recently that the frequency of play is associated with the amount of postnatal brain growth, and that it is also associated with measures of behavioural flexibility, at least in primates. Montgomery further suggested that social and non-social play may contribute to different aspects of behavioural flexibility. Or expressed differently, behavioural flexibility can be read as a sign of cognitive flexibility and that is an argument that can easily be translated to birds.

Corvida have features in common that are generally cited in studies on American and European corvids. These are relatively large brained, have a low mortality rate, stable population size, foraging flexibility and high innovation frequency (Overington et al. 2009). More typical of Australian species, they have flexibility in their breeding timetable that is not shared by any high latitude species, resilience in the face of climatic unpredictability and variability and widespread play behaviour. There is an important recent paper by Jacobs and colleagues pointing out that one forgotten variable in this search for the evolution of complex cognition is the caching of objects (rather than food) in species that do not cache their food. This, according to the authors, is important because the collection of such items may be evidence of exploration and play (Jacobs et al. 2014). Some high-latitude corvids fall into this category, but so do some species in the Australo-Papuan parvorder of Corvida. And in this, bowerbirds are most unusual. The objects they collect and hoard could be called fetishes, because they are of major importance to the owners, and to those who covet them, but do not resemble anything that might be useful for survival. The colour, shape and style of objects all seem to be of major importance to bowerbirds. There is no indication that objects are chosen at random because there is most careful coordination of such objects.

There is also a long-neglected topic of object collection in magpies, currawongs and butcherbirds and other species. The odd shapes of nests made from wire or clothes hangers are not the point of interest, although that too is innovative, but objects such as clothes pegs, spoons and other cutlery, even rings and similar shiny objects, such as buttons, should be of research interest. Clearly, such behaviour cannot be an ‘over-spill’ from caching behaviour, as Jacobs et al. (2014) rightly doubted, because the species that collect such items (at least in the Australian environment) are not necessarily also food cachers, at least not on a regular basis.

The book has shown then that cognitively complex behaviour spreads across several orders among the non-passerines, notably the cockatoos and the parrots, but the passerines in the parvorder Corvida excelled in cognitively complex and innovative behaviour. Birds such as white-winged choughs, magpies, corvids and fairy-wrens all show great plasticity and innovativeness. They have thus become overall bearers of the extraordinary success of this particular parvorder. According to Sibley and Ahlquist (1985), Corvida originated in Australia and separated from the remaining passerines, the Passerida, about 58–60 million years ago. Especially among those species that have been shown to have an unbroken heritage from Gondwana (i.e. are not re-immigrants), there are remarkable accumulations and clusters of complex social behaviour, such as in communication systems that have complex social group interactions and can express shared intentions (Tomasello et al. 2005). Coupled with such behaviour are long lifespan and close pair or group affiliations that often last a lifetime. Perhaps these are the cornerstones that explain their success (Cole et al. 2012).

Despite the diversity of species, it seems that Corvida have traits that, in toto, amount to complex behaviour that requires cognitive ability and brain plasticity.

Parvorder Passerida

The parvorder Passerida comprises swallows and martins, as well as finches and allies. Passerida are thought to have been the successful ‘escapees’ from the Austro-Papuan region and involves a large range of species that moved from Australia and eventually radiated to Asia westwards and eastwards to the northern hemisphere and then spread to other continents. Among these are starlings, true thrushes, bulbuls, African warblers, Old World warblers, Old World larks and Old World wagtails and pipits, sunbirds, sparrows, flowerpeckers, weaverbirds and waxbills – some of which Australia does not have or only as re-immigrants or now as introduced species. Apart from the finches, of which the zebra finch has become so famous internationally, and the starling, known for its cognitively complex behaviour, there is far less evidence of cooperative behaviour in this group and far less evidence of any of the criteria that were described in this book as cognitively complex.

We know a great deal about zebra finch song, especially about the neurobiology of their song development (Konishi and Akutagawa 1985; Simpson and Vicario 1990), song learning (Slater et al. 1988; Adret 1993; Adret et al. 2012), male breeding song (Zann 1993a,b, 1996), song changes (Heather and Mehta 1999; Fehér et al. 2009), song development (Boogert et al. 2008), female choice (Bailey et al. 2002) and extra-pair matings (Birkhead et al. 1988). In our laboratory, we also conducted experiments concerning predator inspection (Koboroff 2009) and we know of their vocal communication in the wild (Dunn and Zann 1996; Zann 1996; Elie et al. 2010).

As Healy and colleagues pointed out, it is surprising how little we know of the cognitive abilities of zebra finches (Healy et al. 2010). Recently, there has been a spate of publications of the personalities and behaviour of zebra finches (Beauchamp 2001; Moe et al. 2009; Schuett and Dall 2009; Mainwaring et al. 2011; Mainwaring and Griffith 2013; David et al. 2011; Brust et al. 2013) generating a profile of a species: a necessary precondition for some cognitive research. As shown in Chapter 4, we tested zebra finches on a means-end task in our laboratory and found them more able than expected to complete the task and do so spontaneously. Auditory perception has been studied to some extent (Dooling et al. 1995). An interesting study of vowel perception (Ohms et al. 2012) is one of the first about perceptual discrimination outside the reproductive context and telling us that speech perception mechanisms are more similar between humans and songbirds than had been previously realised. A recent study focused on visual discrimination and found that they actively choose between live images of conspecifics (Galoch and Bischof 2006).

Another promising approach has been chosen by a group of researchers studying problem-solving behaviour in house sparrows (Bókony et al. 2014). They particularly concentrated on physiological states in relation to task performance and found that birds with low levels of corticosterone (i.e. the stress hormone) performed better at solving more difficult tasks than others with high levels, and were also faster and more efficient in doing so. The same held true for taking parasite load as an index – the lower the load the better the problem-solving ability on difficult tasks (Bókony et al. 2014).

An entire chapter in this book (Chapter 6) was devoted to play behaviour, and with good reason. Its physiological and cognitive ramifications have been shown to be substantial. To reiterate, play has been shown to reduce stress and foster optimal brain development (Ferchmin and Eterovic 1982; Pellis and Pellis 2009; Montgomery 2014). It is not clear what came first: whether the ancient lineages of Corvida and the order of Psittaformes were already large-brained and playing was a side-product of their biology or whether their social habits reduced stress by creating the sense of safety and greater freedom of movement that time and again has been shown to be a predictor of stress reduction (Lendvai et al. 2013). For instance, in Chapter 8, researchers had explained the marked change of song in Bengalese finches, compared with their ancestral munia finches, as a consequence of stress reduction by increased safety (Suzuki et al. 2012).

In summary, it is not clear whether the Passerida are a parvorder that, as a whole, has evolved less in its cognitive capacity (with important exceptions) or whether researchers have generally been less interested in pursuing such lines of inquiry in this diverse group of birds.

We were also reminded as a result of the very extensive and innovative research produced in the last decade or so that staying close to physiological and biological parameters has led us closer to also understanding the cognitive behaviour of birds. A good deal of work though still needs to be done.

Epilogue

It has been argued that evolution of cognition is ultimately dependent on innovation. A crucial innovation thought to have occurred some 40 million years ago (the innovation of nesting) is considered to have led to a major change in avian fortunes. In humans, tool use and spending more time with offspring (producing ‘quality’ offspring) apparently occurred with increased brain size, led to greater chances of survival and, in turn, to more innovation. However plausible or implausible such suggestions of prehistoric trigger points might be, there is plenty of current evidence that innovation correlates with larger brain size. Ironically, while writing these lines, publications are pouring out of the neuroscience research field of human origin, stating in just about every major paragraph that the link between innovation and the evolution of the brain is unique to human evolution, but it seems this is not correct. Indeed, many of the evolutionary processes and brain functions that had been claimed to be exclusive to humans can be traced to other vertebrates and, importantly, to birds and even invertebrates.

It has also emerged that big brains are linked with a variety of seemingly unrelated qualities that were discussed in this book – the link between behavioural and ecological flexibility, delayed pair bonding, high investment in parental care of offspring, a long life and, specifically in Australia, cooperative behaviour (see Appendix 1). It was shown that many species engage in extensive play behaviour, are likely to have low stress levels, show evidence of long-term memory, brain plasticity, the capacity to solve problems and find innovative solutions.

Additionally, the evolution of extant native species was linked to the Gondwanan origin where the land, the climate and the continent itself can be seen as crucially shaping the evolution of modern birds. The detective work on trying to find markers in Australian species purely via looking at some of their behaviour has resulted in an astounding wealth of information on the versatility, resourcefulness and complex social and individual problem-solving abilities in Australian birds.

But what if the particular types of behaviour we have traced so carefully (from nest building to tool using to artistic design) are just ‘cognitive modules’: concrete but isolated adaptations that have nothing to do with general intelligence? Lefebvre (2013) asked this question again recently. To an extent, this book has been guilty of considering behaviour in the same modularity. I suggest that such modularity is necessary as a first step of meticulously documenting and testing what birds (and mammals) can actually do. Before such endeavours began, we simply believed that behaviour such as tool using and problem solving, ‘time travel’, awareness of emotions and states of mind in others and formulating abstract concepts and the many other traits explored in this book were the province of humans alone. This book has shown that native birds express a wide variety of emotions, show their extraordinary abilities to solve problems, to cooperate and to make substantial commitments of time and effort in order to raise offspring that might even be better equipped to face their environments in which they find themselves.

Birds and primates show similar relationships between innovation rate and relative forebrain volume, innovation rate and tool use, and innovation rate and individual learning ability, suggesting perhaps even that a common, general factor might underlie animal cognition. The idea that brain size alone explains a range of behaviours has remained doubtful, and how increases in brain size and, in some cases, clearly evident cognitive superiority of one species over other species can be explained in an evolutionary context. It depends also which discipline asks the question: whether anthropologists (Deaner et al. 2007; van Schaik et al. 2012), biologists (Iwaniuk and Arnold 2004; Iwaniuk et al. 2005) or neuroscientists (Veit and Nieder 2013), but monocausal explanations would rarely satisfy.

It has also been hinted throughout the book that there are schools of thought that doubt very much that birds have anything approaching theory of mind and that most of the astounding single pieces of evidence of ‘intelligent’ behaviour could and should be explained by simpler mechanisms. The jury is still out on some of the findings, but the debate is vigorous. A healthy scepticism is a very necessary concomitant in such research (Crystal 2014) but not on the grounds that were touted before, namely in defence of human uniqueness, but for the purpose of understanding the limits and extent to which birds must be adaptable, able to solve problems, make decisions, communicate and think in order to survive. Bird research will continue to thrive, not only because neuroscience has developed the bird brain as a major model for a large range of questions but also there is an unexpected and high-powered interest in the bird brain from a seemingly unlikely source: the research on artificial intelligence and the millions of dollars poured into brain-like forms of cognitive computing (Cauwenberghs 2013).

In this book the task was to present sufficient evidence, if at times anecdotal, to ask very specific questions of Australian birds, but a good deal of work would still need to be done. The ‘big’ questions remain largely rhetorical in the absence of a solid body of evidence: ‘has their long time existence on this continent together with the changes of climate led to specific conditions that have made Australian birds more bonded, more cooperative, more long lived and perhaps brighter than birds of the temperate zones of the northern hemisphere?’ – the thought is tantalising but some of the correlations that were explored are more than fascinating, they are compelling. Australian birds are remarkable and likely to be cognitively so advanced that we cannot but have the greatest respect for them and do everything in our power to safeguard their future in small and large ways, supporting them both in our backyards and in state and federal policies.

Yet, despite the many extraordinary things they are able to do, native birds are not faring as well as they should, and the claim of their intelligence may well be questioned because the evidence seems to suggest that they have not adapted well enough to survive in present-day Australia. At least a quarter of all native birds are at risk. And this could well be a valid argument were it not for the short timespan in which all the many changes, including the many introduced species, have happened that continue to harm many bird species. Birds have had to contend with introduced predators, such as rats and cats (Dickman 2009). Cat owners, according to a recent survey by the Australian Companion Animal Council, ACAC (website: http://www.acac.org.au/pet_care.html), admitted that their well-fed cats had killed an average rate of 3.3 animals per month or 40 animals per year (ACAC) and displayed the bodies to the owners. Because there are 2.5 million domestic cats in this country, the total death toll per year (and many of them native birds) is staggering. Another study of domestic cat damage to bird life in Wahroonga near the Ku-rin-gai Chase National Park showed that domestic cats predated on native birds not just at high rates but included many different species (Rose 1975). Within the study period, 35 different species were taken and these were not just small birds but rather medium-sized and larger species such as magpie-larks, rainbow lorikeets, crimson and eastern rosellas, red wattlebirds and grey butcherbirds. Mammals taken even included ring-tailed possums and sugar gliders.

However, reasons for the decline of birds are not sufficiently explained by predatory pressures alone. Bayly and Blumstein (2001) concluded in their paper more than a decade ago that the decline in bush birds was the result of an interaction between many factors, even including contamination of soil, apart from the obvious reduction in habitat (Watson 2011). A less well-known reason is that the very activity of fossil fuel extraction has a lastingly harmful effect on biodiversity (Butt et al. 2014).

Only in few places around the globe are there any deliberate and funded programs that are considering the effect of modern technology on wildlife. Powerlines, cars, airplanes, boats, tracking stations, wire, barbed wire and electric fences are structures that kill animals, especially birds, in their hundreds and thousands (Martin and Shaw 2010; Martin 2011). One newspaper pointed out recently that the road toll in New South Wales alone claims 7000 victims of native animals daily (see Tweed Valley Wildlife website http://www.tvwc.org.au/contact.php).

Wind turbines pose the most recent threat to birds. In a 5-year study, it was revealed that the wind turbines at Altamont Pass (California) had killed 2300 eagles (Thelander et al. 2003). A report a year later indicated that the known figures for California alone were higher than expected: 12 300 raptors and 50 000 small birds were known victims to wind turbines (Smallwood and Thelander 2004). It has been suggested that wind turbines will wipe out the Scottish eagle and an eerie statistic predicts that grand-scale windfarms can kill up to 500 000 birds a year. In Australia, there has been an incident in 2005 that recorded the death of a wedge-tailed eagle on Codrington wind farm, which, a company spokesperson said, was investigated and was attributed to a ‘sharp instrument’ but not admitted to have been caused by a wind turbine (Editorial, Boobook 25 (1), Sept 2007, p. 3). The reasons for the birds’ demise were explained by Graham Martin, a specialist in avian vision. For flight, the eyes of many birds are positioned laterally (Martin 2007) because there are naturally no structures in the sky and birds actually have very little vision of things directly in front of them. Binocular vision is very much short range and designed to pick up food well under a metre away (Kaplan and Rogers 2001). Also, birds tend to look down moving their heads sideways to map their flight paths instead of ahead and they actually do not see the wind turbines in front of them (Martin 2009, 2011; Martin and Shaw 2010). If one adds in habitat loss and climate change, it is easy to see that birds are overwhelmed and have had too little time to adapt, no matter how innovative and flexible they may be (Murphy and Legge 2007).

It appears that some species have learned to adjust their flight intention distance to cars according to the speed of approaching vehicles and have learned to judge the safe distance at which they can get away thereby avoiding collision (Verweij et al. 2010). One study specifically looked at galahs (Cárdenas et al. 2005). A Canadian study (Legagneux and Ducatez 2013) found that a broad range of unrelated species have learned some lessons of the physics of speed in relation to their take off. In a 50 km/h speed limit, birds on the road typically took off when the car was about 15 m away, whereas at stretches of 110 km/h, they flew off when a car was about 75 m away. Hence, at least in terms of car speed, there seems to be some hope that birds are getting better at avoiding accidents and saving their own lives. Birds have also learned to nest in novel places, test and use new environments and food sources and avoid at least some predators (such as humans).

It is not that birds lack the capacity to adjust to a few changes but all of them together are likely to be overwhelming. It is not a matter of the birds being unadaptive, but even just the factors mentioned here are powerful and destructive. Olney and colleagues argued in 1994 that we need to show creativity in conservation (Olney et al. 1994). Creativity here also involves the willing partnership and interface between engineers, infrastructure development, education, public relations, fund raising, behaviour, genetics, captive breeding and care, ecology, population dynamics and conservation politics (Olney et al. 1994; Black 1998). Thankfully, there are now detailed plans available on how to help birds in the context of climate change and preserve species that are already vulnerable or exposed (Garnett et al. 2013) and volunteers and specialised ornithological groups are doing much to try and prevent further decline. These kinds of activities are simply saying that the land and its animals are given their due by us as stewards and caretakers, not as pillagers or travellers indifferent to its many extraordinary features.

I have recently been asked whether it is at all important for saving species whether or not they show complex cognitive behaviour. The person who asked felt that it was merely icing on the cake. Perhaps our consciousness needs to be raised in this regard – what do we really know about another organism until we know what it can do and think, whether it can learn (or indeed must learn) and how it can cope with change? The word ‘habitat loss’ is now familiar enough but it hides the fact that we constantly expose animals to high stress, that we ask animals to become refugees, change their homes and territories when we build a highway or create a new housing estate.

No doubt, cognition will be an important topic for the future, precisely because the ruptures humans have created set parameters that may be entirely novel and no longer part of the Gondwanan script. Sol and colleagues established the link between adaptability, enhanced cognition and the responses that birds can make to novel environments (Sol et al. 2005).

Australian birds have shown remarkable resilience and ingenuity indeed. It is hoped that this book, while having had to remain speculative in so many ways, has shown convincingly that Australian birds have a life and a mind of their own, having staked a claim to this continent long before humans evolved or set foot on it.