Stimpunks Foundation × More Realms · L★S · Field Guide No. 23

A Field Guide to Bird Minds

Thirteen birds, sorted not by how clever they are but by what we wanted each one to prove — because that sort turned out to be the informative one. Three sections hold the birds who were recruited into an argument about cognition. The fourth holds four who never were, and who supplied the anatomy, the developmental atlas and the control conditions the argument now runs on. None of them is ranked, and none is the best one.

L★S
How to use this guide Each entry gives the bird, what it was asked to demonstrate, a figure or two worth holding, and — where a claim travels further than its evidence — a “how it circulates / as it checks out” table. Click any entry to open its field notes. Sources are consolidated in the footer.
The companion zine Older Than Either of Us (No. 86) is the argument this catalogue serves. Its subject is the circuit: Stacho and colleagues found radial and tangential fibres crossing at right angles throughout the pigeon and barn owl forebrain — a cortex-like canonical circuit in a brain with no cortex — and three papers currently disagree about whether birds inherited it from the last common stem amniote or arrived at it independently. This guide does not settle that either. It lays out the animals.
Why “asked to prove” is the sort The obvious sorts all failed. By taxonomy you get parrots, corvids and everyone else, which tells you nothing about minds. By cleverness you are building the ranking this house exists to refuse. What actually divides these thirteen is the question a researcher brought to them — and that is a fact about us, not about birds. It also produces the guide’s finding, which nobody set out to make: the section of birds nobody was arguing about is the section the evidence came from.

Four things we went looking for

A century of comparative psychology approached birds with a series of requests, and each request shaped what got measured. Can it mean something? produced the vocal-learning literature and Alex. Can it make a plan? produced the tool studies. Can it remember when? produced the caching work, and with it the only claims here about episodic-like memory. And then there is the fourth group, who were asked nothing of the kind — they were laboratory and farmyard animals, chosen for being cheap, tractable and available — and who between them furnished the fibre architecture, the single-cell developmental atlas, the stereoscopic comparison and the negative control. Four sections, and the last one is not a leftover.

One · Asked to mean it
Three birds put to the question of whether a signal carries content
Two · Asked to make a plan
Four birds put to tools, sequences and tomorrow
Three · Asked to remember when
Two cachers, and the one domain where the corvids do not match apes
Four · Never asked
Four birds nobody was arguing about, holding the map
One · Asked to mean it

When the question was whether the signal carries content

Three birds brought to the hardest and least tractable request: not can it copy a sound — which is settled and unremarkable — but does the sound mean anything to the bird making it. Two of these three produced results that hold. The third produced the most famous result in the whole field and it has not been repeated, which is why its card is here and not quietly left out.

Two · Asked to make a plan

When the question was whether there is a sequence in mind

Four birds asked to hold something that is not in front of them: a tool that is out of sight, a step that comes after this one, a reward that exists only tomorrow. This is the section the videos come from, and it is worth knowing that the laboratory versions are narrower and stranger than the clips — a raven turning down food it could eat now is a more specific finding than a bird looking smart.

Three · Asked to remember when

When the question was whether a bird has a past

Two cachers, and between them the clearest case in the guide that a capacity is shaped by the life that needs it. One caches tens of thousands of one thing and must hold locations for months. The other caches a variety of perishable things and must hold when as well as where. Same family, different problem, different mind. And this is the section that contains the honest exception — the one cognitive domain where the ravens do not keep up.

Four · Never asked

The birds nobody was arguing about

Four birds who were never candidates for cleverness, and who are the reason the argument exists. The fibre architecture that started the current dispute was imaged in a pigeon. The developmental atlas that took the dispute down to single cells was built from a chicken. The second species that turned one measurement into a finding was a barn owl. And the comparison that shows brain size is not the variable is a corvid against an ostrich. Nobody put these four on a poster. Read this section and the guide's line arrives on its own.

Where the form stops

Two questions nobody has settled

These two cards carry no reframe table, and the absence is the argument. A “how it circulates / as it checks out” table asserts that there is a verdict and that we have it. For these two there is no verdict — there is a live disagreement between working researchers — and running the apparatus over it would be us borrowing the authority of a settled finding for an open question. Same rule as Field Guide No. 10, where the turtles people made get a different card rather than a smaller one. They are not counted among the thirteen entries.

Not: Not a ranking with the birds moved up it. If the reward for a century of being called a bird brain is a place higher on the same ladder, nothing has been learned. The kea does not need to beat the chimpanzee. Not the superpower framing. Dense pallial packing and cheap neurons are trade-offs, arrived at by nobody's choice, with real costs. An adaptation is not a gift and not a moral. Not “birds are basically little people.” The gross anatomy is genuinely different and every paper here says so. What is shared is a wiring motif, and even that is currently disputed. Not proof that the clips you have seen mean what the caption said. Several do. The magpie card is here specifically because one of the most-shared claims in this whole area rests on two birds and failed a replication. Not a claim that the fourth section's birds are secretly the cleverest. That would be the same move again. They are the ones nobody needed to be clever, and that is a different and more useful thing to notice. Not our adjudication of an open dispute. Three research groups disagree about where the circuit came from. We have read them and we are not qualified to referee, so the last two cards say so instead of picking.
The line: Twelve of the guides in this collection arrive at there is no standard star, nest, egg, shark, turtle, galaxy, nervous system, way to rest, way of being family — derived by reading every hit rather than counting them, since one guide matches the phrase in order to decline it. This one arrives at the version that the phrase bird brain exists to prevent. There are something like eleven thousand species of bird. The share of a brain's neurons sitting in the pallium runs about 19 per cent in primates, 62 in parrots and 78 in songbirds. Brains in this literature run from one gram to twenty-five. A pigeon and a kea and an ostrich are not three grades of the same animal, and the insult collapses all of them into one. There is no standard bird. Not among the birds, and not in the sense the phrase intends either — there was never a standard for them to fall short of.