![]() ![]() At one point Jennifer Ackerman makes a brief, representative list of both the smart and the stupid birds, and I couldn’t help noticing that the former – crows, herons, gulls, woodpeckers, and so on – are not eaten by humans, whereas the more intellectually compromised ones (who go on EDL marches and buy extended warranties on white goods) such as partridges, turkeys and quail are considered good eating. So, avian intelligence exists on a wide spectrum, with the dimmer end seemingly, like the dodo, almost striving for extinction, voting for Brexit and so on, while at the top end of the scale we have marvels, with only the higher primates matching the birds’ tool-crafting capabilities. ![]() I looked up pictures of both (sadly, there are no colour plates in this book) and observed that while the crow looked very smart and capable, Pierce Brosnan-era Bond in terms of looks, the kagu would appear to have been designed by someone who had been given the brief “make a ridiculously daft-looking bird”. Meanwhile, also in New Caledonia, there exists the flightless kagu, a bird so stupid that it runs towards predators. ![]() ![]() I distinctly recall thinking that I was not at all confident I could have worked it out myself. Y ou may remember seeing a short BBC film a few years ago in which a New Caledonian crow, known as “007”, navigated an eight-stage puzzle in order to retrieve a piece of meat. ![]()
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