# Are smarter birds less developed upon hatching?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-smarter-birds-less-developed-upon-hatching/726862>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [August 3, 2015, 6:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-smarter-birds-less-developed-upon-hatching/726862 "2015-08-03T06:57:06Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![elfkin477](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/a9a28c/32.png) [@elfkin477](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elfkin477)\
**Post date:** [August 3, 2015, 6:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-smarter-birds-less-developed-upon-hatching/726862/1 "2015-08-03T06:57:06Z")

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**Is** there a correlation between the intelligence a bird and how helpless it is when it hatches? Parrots are extremely smart birds, and their newly hatched babies are helpless and blind. I believe crow and raven hatchlings are equally helpless. Chickens have chicks that grow wing feathers at less than a week old, and they’re obviously less intelligent by far. Ducks and turkeys don’t get all their feathers quite so fast, but obviously a lot faster than a parrot.

I understand that being helpless at birth is called altricial and being more independent is precocial, but are there dumb altricial hatchlings and smart precocial hatchlings? The division doesn’t exist in mammals as both humans and rabbits (but not hares) are altricial.

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**Author:** ![thelurkinghorror](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/7c8e57/32.png) [@thelurkinghorror](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thelurkinghorror)\
**Post date:** [August 3, 2015, 7:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-smarter-birds-less-developed-upon-hatching/726862/2 "2015-08-03T07:48:08Z")

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[Found this](http://web.stanford.edu/group/stanfordbirds/text/essays/Precocial_and_Altricial.html).

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**Author:** ![elfkin477](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/a9a28c/32.png) [@elfkin477](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elfkin477)\
**Post date:** [August 3, 2015, 1:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-smarter-birds-less-developed-upon-hatching/726862/3 "2015-08-03T13:50:04Z")

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> [@thelurkinghorror](#):
>
> [Found this](http://web.stanford.edu/group/stanfordbirds/text/essays/Precocial_and_Altricial.html).

> [@](#):
>
> Interestingly, there seems to be an evolutionary trade-off in bird brain sizes related to the degree of precocity. Precocial species have relatively large brains at hatching-as one might expect since the young, to one degree or another, must be able to fend for themselves. But precocial species trade for this advantage an adult brain that is small in relation to their body size. Altricial young, in contrast, are born small-brained, but on the pro-tern-rich diet provided by the adults (and with their highly efficient digestive tracts) postnatal brain growth is great, and the adults have proportionally larger brains than precocial species.

Hmm. In birds does having a larger brain necessarily translate into being smarter? If so, it looks like the answer to my initial question is yes.