Young birds that devote themselves to feeding their siblings and others so competitive they’ll stab their nestmates to death. Some of these extraordinary behaviors are biological conundrums that seem to push the edges of–well–birdness: A mother bird that kills her own infant sons, and another that selflessly tends to the young of other birds as if they were her own. They’re also revealing the remarkable intelligence underlying these activities, abilities we once considered uniquely our own–deception, manipulation, cheating, kidnapping, infanticide, but also, ingenious communication between species, cooperation, collaboration, altruism, culture, and play. What they are finding is upending the traditional view of how birds conduct their lives, how they communicate, forage, court, breed, survive. But the bird way is much more than a unique pattern of brain wiring, and lately, scientists have taken a new look at bird behaviors they have, for years, dismissed as anomalies or mysteries. “There is the mammal way and there is the bird way.” This is one scientist’s pithy distinction between mammal brains and bird brains: two ways to make a highly intelligent mind.
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