Scientist Rates Bird IQs

Feb. 24, 2005 — -- Louis Lefebvre knows a bird brain when he sees one. In fact, Lefebvre, an animal behaviorist at McGill University in Montreal, has even come up with an IQ test for birds that has allowed him to create a pecking order in mental abilities among our fine feathered friends.

It's not that he's all that taken with birds. What Lefebvre is studying is intelligence and how it evolved among various species, including humans. Of particular interest to him is the correlation between brain size and intelligence, which has fascinated scientists for decades.

He turned to birds because, well, they're different from you and me.

"If we only look at primates the kind of intelligence we'll be studying might be too similar to our own," he says. So he turned to birds because they are so different from us there's less likely to be a "culture bias" in attempting to understand their intelligence.

Lefebvre thinks he knows which birds out there are the smartest, but he readily admits his research is not all that conclusive. Experts disagree fiercely even over the definition of intelligence, so there has to be some wiggle room here.

"We don't know what intelligence is in humans, much less other animals," he says.

For purposes of his research, Lefebvre defines it as "innovativeness" or the ability to adapt to different challenges. That at least allows him to "put a number on it," which is a measurement of innovativeness, and quite possibly intelligence.

So for the record, the smartest bird in the world isn't your expensive parrot that has learned how to repeat your private comments at the most inopportune time. It's just the common crow.

That won't surprise bird lovers who have long marveled at the cleverness of this member of the corvidae family. There are many celebrated cases of innovativeness among crows, which are known to manufacture tools to accomplish varied tasks.

Perhaps the most famous is the Japanese carrion crow that is clearly over the top when it comes to bird IQ. These crows routinely perch at traffic intersections near a university campus in Japan and wait for a red light.