Birds are amazing animals. They are highly diverse in size, shape, color, and lifestyles, and detailed research continues to show that they are intelligent, emotional, and sentient beings, so being called a birdbrain is actually a compliment rather than a dismissive insult.1 These are among the many reasons why I was thrilled to learn about a new book titled A Bird’s IQ: Innovation, Intelligence, and Problem Solving in the Avian World, written by one of the world’s leading avian biologists, Dr. Louis Lefebvre.
This gem of a book is a must-read encyclopedia packed with the latest science and vivid storytelling. The book’s description tells it all: “Blending his decades of scientific research with engaging anecdotes, Lefebvre examines the evolutionary forces that have shaped avian intelligence. He explores how birds adapt to urban environments, innovate in response to challenges, and pass down knowledge across generations. This goldmine of bird behavior yields an ‘innovation quotient’ (like our human IQ) widely used by researchers to measure and rank how innovative a bird species is.” Here’s what Lefebvre had to say about the secret intelligence of birds and much more.
Marc Bekoff: Why did you write A Bird’s IQ?
Louis Lefebvre: To alert people to the amazing feeding behaviors that birds innovate and how we can use these behaviors to better understand how intelligence evolved. Since the mid-1990s, I have created a database of over 4,500 cases of new and unusual feeding behaviors people have seen in over 1,600 species of birds. A large part of my book describes some of these amazing cases, and it also shows how we can use the numbers in the database to test ideas in ecology. Can innovations help a species colonize a new country? Can they help reduce extinction risk? Who is more innovative, year-round residents or migrants? And neuroscience: Do innovators have bigger brains and more neurons or more neurotransmitter receptors in the brain part that is equivalent in birds to our mammalian cortex?
MB: How does your book relate to your background and general areas of interest?
LL: I have worked on the topic of avian innovation since the mid 1990s, and before that on cultural transmission in birds. I have been doing field work with birds since the 1980s, first in Montreal with urban pigeons, then in Barbados (where my university, McGill, has a field station) with doves, grackles, and bullfinches. I was trained as a comparative psychologist (M.A, Ph.D.) at the University of Montreal, did an internship in neurophysiology at the Italian CNR lab in Pisa, and a postdoc at Oxford University (with Richard Dawkins), as well as a stint at the chimpanzee lab at the University of Montreal. I was a biology professor at McGill University for 40 years and am currently an emeritus professor there. I have also published four novels (in my native French), two of which were shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award in Canada. I like to write!
MB: Who do you hope to reach?
LL: 1) Bird enthusiasts (they are the people whose observations I use for my innovation database); 2) professional scientists (to show how we can use innovation rate and problem-solving to explore ideas on the evolution of cognition); 3) people who wonder where human intelligence comes from (we are not just naked apes due to our ancestral lineage, but also featherless crows due to convergent evolution of our corvid-like opportunism and invasiveness).
MB: What are the main topics you consider, and what are some of your major messages?
LL: I compare different groups of birds in terms of how innovative they are in the wild and how well they perform intelligence tests in captivity. Some groups rank very high on these measures (corvids, for example), some very low (ostriches, turkeys). I show how the same measures I developed for birds have been used to compare primates and what the many similar trends in the two groups reveal about the convergent evolution of intelligence. I describe how the brains of birds and primates differ but also show amazing resemblances. I discuss topics like urbanization, cultural transmission, whether there are many kinds of intelligence, whether intelligence might help you survive, or whether it can also signal you as a more desirable partner (natural versus sexual selection). The main message concerns the independent, convergent evolution that has led intelligence to show similar trends in different groups of birds and different primate groups separated by millions of years of divergent descent.
MB: How does your work differ from others on the same general topics?
LL: Because I am both a novelist and a scientist, my book differs from the typical academic book because it tells a lot of stories, but it also differs from popular books (for example, Jennifer Ackerman’s excellent Genius of Birds) by the fact that it is written by the scientist who proposed and developed the measure of intelligence described in the book, innovation rate, including the personal story of frustrations and serendipity that led me to the measure.
MB: Are you hopeful that, as people learn more about these amazing animals, they will treat them with more dignity, respect, and compassion?
LL: Yes. Birds are sometimes called “birdbrains” or “featherbrained”. (The original title of my book in French uses a derogatory term we use to insult people we deem stupid, Têtes de linotte, literally “linnet heads.”) I hope we come to respect the intelligence of many birds as highly as we do the intelligence of many primates and that we start calling ourselves “featherless crows” as well as “naked apes.”