Laura Erickson’s For the Birds

JIM BAKER: You’re listening to GYR-Channel, striving for media monopoly since 1975. Now, back to “Birds in the News.”

LAURA: I’m at the Cornell Lavatory of Orthinology, talking with Dr. Marlene Perkins about the lavatory’s recent discoveries about bird intelligence. Dr. Perkins, you noted that studies recently released by an international team sparked the lavatory’s elegant new approach to determining avian intelligence.

DR. PERKINS: Yes, a new body of studies look at the avian brain size relative to body size, and amassed a huge body of anecdotal information about novel feeding approaches taken by various species. These approaches seemed interesting, but suddenly it occurred to us that questions about bird IQ could really be studied far more directly. Our original plan was to administer the Benet IQ test to birds, but we found that too hard to get ahold of. The SAT was too expensive. So in our final experimental model, we settled on the ACT.

LAURA: Excuse me?

DR. PERKINS: You know, the ACT, the college admissions test high school kids take. We gave that same test to birds, but we knew at the onset that most birds are functionally illiterate, though whether that is determined by biology or cultural conditioning is anybody’s guess. We didn’t really care how many right answers they got. We wanted to determine just what they would do with the pencil and paper.

LAURA: And you found?

DR. PERKINS: Our original experimental design called for this test to be administered at the same time and place where high school students were taking their ACT test. We were interested in whether birds would take cues from the students in dealing with the test.

After our first trial, several students lodged complaints against us. Apparently, they found it distracting being tested when seated next to a bald eagle or a hummingbird. And of course, there was that awkward situation with a great blue heron. I guess we really should have tethered it. When it took off in flight, evacuating a stream of, well… We covered the laundry bills for the students who were in the flight path. replaced a few articles of clothing, and were lucky that the one student whose test papers were destroyed settled out of court. But the experience made us rethink that part of the protocol.

So what we did was videotape students and compare the manner in which they handled their pencil and test papers with that of representative individuals from several avian families, and made some surprising findings.

We discovered that ruby-throated hummingbirds can select correct answers shown actually by touching them with their beaks with 100% accuracy as long as the correct answers have been circled with a red pen. When students were given tests with the correct answers already marked in red, they had a tendency to mistrust that all the answers circled were correct, and often ended up with two or three wrong. We found that very interesting.

Starlings, like many students, mouthed their pencils. Ravens and eagles both carried their pencils off. Interestingly, the only students who did this waited until after taking the test to steal the pencils.

Blue Jays had a tendency to roll pencils off the desk and watch them hit the floor. Interestingly, the only students we videotaped intentionally rolling a pencil off their desks were a boy and a girl using the opportunity to set up a date for that evening. We don’t know if Blue Jays would have used the pencils in a similar courtship ritual because our first rounds of experiments weren’t timed for the breeding season.

LAURA: So apparently you’ll be conducting more experiments?

DR. PERKINS: Oh, yes. We’ve barely scratched the surface.

LAURA: Thanks so much, Dr. Perkins, for the Cornell Lavatory of Orthinology, this is Laura Erickson with the GYR-Channel. And now a word from our sponsor.

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