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Why Being Called a ‘Bird Brain’ Might Now Be a Compliment

By Gregon

We posted last week about the growing evidence for animal consciousness in various species. Here’s another to perhaps add to the list – a bird that appears to be using bait to catch a fish.

Given the size of the piece of bread it’s using, it obviously prefers fish to grain. The odd bit is that it seems to be happy letting the fish eat the bread until the very last piece…surely it’s not ‘fattening up’ its prey before eating?

(via @BryanAppleyard)

Greg
Editor
Greg is the owner-editor of The Daily Grail, as well as the author of a number of books including Stop Worrying, There Probably is an Afterlife.
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3 Comments

  1. When Bird Brains Give You the Bird!
    To my eyes at least the bird’s quite clearly using the bread to draw the fish in closer. In fact it’s almost like a duel of wits going on with the fish watching as the bread appears and disappears on the surface above cagily keeping its distance until a piece breaks off and having acquired a taste for more finally closes in on the remainder forgetting all about its opponent in the chess match.

    It seems to me its societal birds who have to cooperate with others of their kind who demonstrate the most smarts.

    For instance whenever I put grass seed down this beautiful black racing pigeon I’ve dubbed Oily turns up and starts organising the other pigeons like a general.

    For a while I’ve known whenever there’s been pigeons on the roof behind me waiting to pounce because Oily’d sit on the fence and continuously tilt her head [I’m presuming she’s female because she seems smaller than the others] at a right angle and horizontally flash her eye up at the roof then exaggeratedly pull her head round and down in the direction of wherever she’d seen me put down seed inviting her chums to swoop down and overwhelm me by their numbers.

    I learned to anticipate all this though and now they refuse to come down but she now leaves the fence and walks right up to me in such a cheeky and outrageously bold but comic fashion I end up pissing myself laughing at her sheer nerve so of course they all start coming down again.

    A few months back I also saw on the lawn something I haven’t seen for decades now a starling which kept doing this magician like routine of one moment having a small thin pale worm in its beak then suddenly shaking its head to make the worm seemingly turn into a big fat red one. While I was trying to explain to myself maybe it was squeezing the thin worms fat or the fat worms thin suddenly it bobbed its head down in the grass and when it lifted it back up it had about ten worms in its beak.

    It’d actually been sorting these worms out and seemingly laying them out according to size and colour.

    But just before it flew off with them it snipped its beak in such a way part of about half of the worms was cut off and allowed to drop back in the grass.

    I’m still trying to work out was it so smart it actually understood severed worms can actually regrow?

  2. Size is important
    >> The odd bit is that it seems to be happy letting the fish eat the bread until the very last piece …

    I thought it was waiting for the right sized fish — and grabbing the bread back before it could be eaten by fish that were too large.

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