Tom Cox @cox tom
Almost certainly the best thing I wa ever told about owls was when I met an owl handler and he told me that the wild owls in the sanctuary where he worked worried about the tame show owls there and sometimes stopped by to leave them shrews and mice as presents.
Birds are way smarter than we give them credit for. Im possitive that the smarter ones have a rudimentary language, specifically corvids. Owls are so cool, where I live I can go spot great horned owls just hiking around.
Parrots are definitely capable of using human words and phrases in context. Stuff like “bye bye” when someone leaves a room, or “want some water?” when they see you drinking from a glass and want to have a taste. Attaching sounds to concepts and using them to communicate those concepts seems like basic language stuff to me!
Source: had parrots my whole life. +bird tax
That’s like the first beautiful tamed picture of a parrot I’ve seen. My aunt has a 27 year old parrot so he’s an old fuck and I used to have a friend who’s emotional state was so fucked up that her bird looked like she was on crack. Please more picture of your parrot please
Isn’t bird singing a rudimentary language ? They have different songs with different meanings
I mean as in they can describe appearances and events to each other, but probably not formulate any plans more complex than eat here, avoid that place, attack guys dressed up in Jason Voorhees costumes because three generations ago a guy dressed like that messed around with our nests… stuff like that
One time I tried to talk to a crow by telling it to caw once for yes, twice for no.
Grabbed its attention with a friendly greeting, to which it turned and looked at me, waiting for what I’d say, keeping eye-contact and everything.
I asked it if it actually was a crow, since I wasn’t sure. It cawed once, and patiently waited for me to speak again, looking at me all curious. I said Thank you, and it looked like it nodded.
Obviously I have no idea if that bird actually understands that crow is what humans call it, but it did feel like I had an actual conversation with it.
My immediate thought was imagining an owl hopping from boulder to bush, hiking around a forest.
My second thought was that I’m an idiot.
Anecdotal story for you. I worked at a restaurant where our dumpster was across the parking lot. So when we took out trash it was a little walk. One time when taking out the trash, as I opened the door to go outside I heard a bird start chirping. It then flew over the dumpster, and as it passed over about 10 other birds flew out of the dumpster. He was the lookout.
I have ducks, and they’re way smarter than people think. I have them trained pretty well. They follow some basic commands that make handling them easier. My favorite bird also helps me wrangle any ducks who aren’t listening. I just tell him to help me and he does lol.
Owls might be interesting birds but they’ve got the brains the size of a grape.
Number of neurons / brain size in comparison to total body size is a common metric used to predict intelligence. Bigger bodies need more neurons dedicated to control and coordinator muscles and organs.
Besides the excess neutrons, it helps if the animal frequently have free time and energy available after hunting for food as well as not needing to constantly watch for predators.
Even then it’s just a vague correlation, not a strong prediction.
Bird brains are small in general. Therefore the high intelligence of some species was quite surprising. There’s some fresh research showing that bird neurons are way smaller than mammal neurons - so quite an impressive number of them can be fitted in a small brain. They have a small brain with a big computational power. My pet theory is that this characteristic could have been present already in the dinos, making them smart instead of dull.
You see your brain is bigger than that of an owl but still you didn’t even look up established fakt about intelligence and rather made a stupid comment that is making the same argument as the nazis did back then.
Eh? The Nazis had opinions on owls?
I’m just saying they are not smart. The idea of the wise owl is a myth they have the smallest brain to body size of any bird. There’s more going on in the head of a pigeon