The Genius of Birds

An award-winning science writer tours the globe to reveal what makes birds capable of such extraordinary feats of mental prowess. As she travels around the world for research, Ackerman not only tells the story of the recently uncovered genius of birds but also delves deeply into the latest findings about the bird brain itself that are revolutionizing our view of what it means to be intelligent.

“[A] gloriously provocative and highly entertaining book. Jennifer Ackerman provides a masterly survey of research in the last two decades that has produced a revolution in our understanding of bird cognition. The Genius of Birds [is] important not only for what it says about birds, but also about the human ingenuity entailed in unraveling the mysteries of the avian brain. It is at once a book of knowledge but also a work of wonder and an affirmation of the astonishing complexity of our world.” —*Wall Street Journal

• “Lovely, celebratory. For all the belittling of ‘bird brains,’ [Ackerman] shows them to be uniquely impressive machines . . .” —*New York Times Book Review 
• “Richly researched . . . The Genius of Birds provides engrossing evidence that will have readers looking at birds in a completely new way.” —*The Daily Progress
• “A lyrical testimony to the wonders of avian intelligence.” —Scientific American

“Ackerman is a pro at parsing scientific con­cepts in an accessible style, and her lyrical writing underscores her appreciation for the beauty and adaptability of birds.” —BookPage
 
“Ackerman writes with a light but assured touch, her prose rich in fact but economical in delivering it. Fans of birds in all their diversity will want to read this one.” —Kirkus Reviews
 
“Ackerman offers plenty of interesting tidbits and backs them up with the relevant history or science, using footnotes to avoid cluttering the text with anything that might slow a reader down. This is one of those terrific books that makes a scientific topic fun without dumbing it down.” —Washington Independent Review of Books

“I love birds; always have. The only thing better than love is love plus deep appreciation. The Genius of Birds is a journey of deep appreciation for the beautiful geniuses all around us, in our gardens, sharing our air, and sharing more of our minds than we might have expected.” 
—Carl Safina, author of *Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel

“Delightful, revolutionary, and illuminated by the clean, curious gaze of an intelligent seeker, *The Genius of Birds is fueled by awe and always, its close cousin, deep respect for the condition of life. It’s a book that demands a moral consideration of the world.” —Rick Bass, author of The Ninemile Wolves and For A Little While: New and Selected Stories*

Auteur

Jennifer Ackerman

Résumé
“Lovely, celebratory. For all the belittling of ‘bird brains,’ [Ackerman] shows them to be uniquely impressive machines . . .” —*New York Times Book Review 

• “A lyrical testimony to the wonders of avian intelligence.” —*Scientific American

An award-winning science writer tours the globe to reveal what makes birds capable of such extraordinary feats of mental prowess*
 
Birds are astonishingly intelligent creatures. According to revolutionary new research, some birds rival primates and even humans in their remarkable forms of intelligence. In The Genius of Birds, acclaimed author Jennifer Ackerman explores their newly discovered brilliance and how it came about.

As she travels around the world to the most cutting-edge frontiers of research, Ackerman not only tells the story of the recently uncovered genius of birds but also delves deeply into the latest findings about the bird brain itself that are shifting our view of what it means to be intelligent. At once personal yet scientific, richly informative and beautifully written, The Genius of Birds celebrates the triumphs of these surprising and fiercely intelligent creatures.

Ackerman is also the author of Birds by the Shore: Observing the Natural Life of the Atlantic Coast. 

Échantillon de lecture
Introduction
 
THE GENIUS OF BIRDS
 
For a long time, the knock on birds was that they’re stupid. Beady eyed and nut brained. Reptiles with wings. Pigeon heads. Tur- keys. They fly into windows, peck at their reflections, buzz into
power lines, blunder into extinction.
Our language reflects our disrespect. Something worthless or un- appealing is “for the birds.” An ineffectual politician is a “lame duck.” To “lay an egg” is to flub a performance. To be “henpecked” is to be ha- rassed with persistent nagging. “Eating crow” is eating humble pie. The expression “bird brain,” for a stupid, foolish, or scatterbrained person, en- tered the English language in the early 1920s because people thought of birds as mere flying, pecking automatons, with brains so small they had no capacity for thought at all.
That view is a gone goose. In the past two decades or so, from fields and laboratories around the world have flowed examples of bird species capable of mental feats comparable to those found in primates. There’s a kind of bird that creates colorful designs out of berries, bits of glass, and blossoms to attract females, and another kind that hides up to thirty- three thousand seeds scattered over dozens of square miles and remem- bers where it put them months later. There’s a species that solves a classic puzzle at nearly the same pace as a five-year-old child, and one that’s an expert at picking locks. There are birds that can count and do simple math, make their own tools, move to the beat of music, comprehend basic prin- ciples of physics, remember the past, and plan for the future.
In the past, other animals have gotten all the publicity for their near- human cleverness. Chimps make stick spears to hunt smaller primates and dolphins communicate in a complex system of whistles and clicks. Great apes console one another and elephants mourn the loss of their own.
Now birds have joined the party. A flood of new research has over- turned 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.

Beginning in the 1980s, the charming and cunning African grey par- rot named Alex partnered with scientist Irene Pepperberg to show the world that some birds appear to have intellectual abilities rivaling those of primates. Before Alex died suddenly at the age of thirty-one (half his expected life span), he had mastered a vocabulary of hundreds of English labels for objects, colors, and shapes. He understood the categories of same and different in number, color, and shape. He could look at a tray holding an array of objects of various colors and materials and say how many there were of a certain type. “How many green keys?” Pepperberg would ask, displaying several green and orange keys and corks. Eight out of ten times, Alex got it right. He could use numbers to answer questions about addition. Among his greatest triumphs, says Pepperberg, were his knowledge of abstract concepts, including a zerolike concept; his capacity to figure out the meaning of a number label from its position in the num- ber line; and his ability to sound out words the way a child…