A bluebird is carrying moss to our birdhouse, beak by beak, and building a nest. And I got to thinking: what’s he thinking?
Animal cognition is, of course, a spectrum. A mating hamster is almost certainly not thinking about what it’s going to be like to have a litter of baby hamsters to raise/devour (childhood trauma alert, never give your kid a pet hamster, they’re worse than gremlins). A dog barking at the door and spinning around when you grab the leash is probably thinking about how much fun it is to go for walks.
But what about complex behaviors like nest-building, for creatures with brains the size of a garden pea? Does that bluebird have any idea what’s going to happen with that nest, or is it just like, “Yep, putting moss here is the right thing to do, let’s get some more moss, no idea why,” and that’s the end of it?
There may not be a scientific answer to this, in which case it belongs in IMHO. But scientists are brilliant at designing experiments to figure out things like, for example, how high a baby can count; so maybe some behaviorist or animal neuropsychologist has some answers. Anyone know?
As a Zoology major in college, we spent a lot of time talking about instinct and how it drives behavior. Lots of scientists have spent the better part of their lives trying to understand why animals behave the way they do.
I don’t think there is any reason to believe that a bluebird thinks about the future in the same way humans do. The weather turns warm, the days are longer, and the drive to reproduce is great. If you’re a bluebird that means build a nest with whatever you can find.
Why do they build a nest, something that takes a long time and a lot of energy to do? Because the birds that built nests attracted females and reproduced more often than those that didn’t. It’s really as simple as that.
Whether they know building a nest attacks females is something we will likely never know, but to a bluebird, it all comes down to sex and reproduction. For many animals that drives almost everything they do.
Bluebirds and other thrushes may or may not be able to think about the future but corvids (crows, ravens, magpies, et cetera) demonstrate high levels of conceptual intelligence including complex tool use and anticipation of future events. There is a lot of animal behavior that is delegated to being “mere instinct” (i.e. not an example of intellect or acquired knowledge) without any real explanation for what that means or how it is reproduced cognitively. There is clearly an innate pressure for nesting and some kind of internal script for how to construct a nest but the more I’ve learned about affective neuroscience and cognitive zoology makes me circumspect about ascribing “simple” motives and uncomplicated mental states to animals with complex neural structures. Of course, all life is essentially about reproduction and the affective ‘circuits’ in the brain are primarily about survival, sex, rearing offspring, and mechanical things like navigation and foraging, but I think reducing animal behavior purely to instinctual drives is oversimplifying.
I agree that crows and ravens seem to have more intelligence than other birds. Their ability to make tools is impressive compared to most other birds, but I haven’t read any research that shows birds think about the future in a similar way to how we do.
I suppose building a nest in anticipation of reproducing is a kind of thinking about the future, but all animals, including humans, do certain things instinctively. Animals don’t learn everything from watching their cohorts or parents. They have inborn instincts for many of their most basic needs, like breathing.
The bluebird is thinking the nest needs more moss. If you can call that thinking at all. His instincts are directing him to do things that relieves the stress of not doing them caused by instinct. That’s in general how we deduce animals are performing acts like a bird building a nest. Beavers will rebuild their dams if they are removed, if you secretly removed each bit of moss after the bluebird added it to the nest it would keep finding moss of other materials until the stress of an unfinished nest subsides. That’s the way it appears to work for animals, and maybe humans too at times, but we don’t really know what a bird or other animal is ‘thinking’ in terms of identifiable thoughts or a plan of action.
Humans can behave like that, driven to certain behaviors such as the urge to reproduce, but there thinking is a rationalization of their behavior that doesn’t paint them as thoughtless emotionally driven animals. Perhaps birds are thinking something else entirely as well when they build their nests, but studies show consistently that preventing instinctive behavior causes stress in animals that is relieved when they are allowed to perform the behavior.
I assume the bluebird is thinking, “my nest needs to be softer, this moss will help”. Or maybe tighter, or some other quality. But i believe the bluebird knows it’s building a nest, and has an idea of what qualities it wants that nest to have, and is trying to execute a desirable nest.
I doubt it’s anticipating chicks. It might be anticipating attracting a mate. (Do bluebirds nest before or after finding mates?)
That raises an interesting (to me) question. Is it essentially the same instinct in species who build nests to attract a mate, vs after? Some birds are surprisingly (again, to me) long-lived. Is it the same instinct year after year, or do they remember previous years?
I have a friend who put up two bird feeders. One was where the previous owner of the house had a bird feeder, and the other was a new place. She said they found the “replacement” feeder that day, but it took them a while to learn that the new one was also a bird feeder. She (and i) assumed they remembered the old feeder.
We have a hard enough time answering what humans are thinking.
As to the “brain the size of a pea”, though, bird brains and mammal brains seem to have different structures, and the bird structure seems to be more efficient: Birds seem to be able to achieve the same intelligence as mammals with smaller brains.
Sidetrack, but is this true in only birds, or in crocodiles too?
Either way it could explain a lot about certsin large and charismatic bird ancestors with remarkably small brains, but if both birds AND crocs have have this adaptation it is far more likely that all archosaurs did.
That study just shows patterns of the development of brain size and body size, and shows that they vary. So, elephant brains for larger as their bodies did, but the brains increased faster. Dolphin brains for larger as their bodies got smaller.
That’s interesting, but i don’t see how it says anything about intelligence.
Chickens may help answer these questions. I don’t know if the bird is anticipating chicks, but they don’t seem surprised, and do seem to understand what to do when the chicks hatch. I base this on hens who clearly didn’t understand – one abandoned the chicks, one killed them (as chickens would normally do to any small wriggling creature that showed up in their nest), but most hens become protective, start teaching the chicks etc.
Chickens don’t mate,( though some do show preference for particular roosters/hens), but when spring arrives the hens start searching for good locations for a nesting site, so for them at least the nesting is not related to mating.
Here is another question: do all the bluebirds in the area seek the same moss nesting material? If so, do other types of birds in the area seek the same moss, or perhaps there is a preference by species, for some reason. If different bluebirds select different materials (such as straw), them something else is going on - different birds of the same species have different preferences. Why would that happen? It would also be interesting to know if the bluebird uses the same material each season - that would indicate some sort of long-term memory, perhaps.
While ‘planning’ infers some concept of the future (mating, chicks, etc), the selection of nest material is an immediate decision.
In organisms with little or no cognitive capacity, adaptive behaviors are just mechanical routines - simple chemotaxis, for example. But for us (and presumably many other animals) it often appears to work better through a general inclination toward a behavior - an emotional state - that allows detailed implementation of the behavior to be managed by a brain that can respond tactically to circumstances.
The fact that birds (as you have observed) sometimes make mistakes in implementation is good evidence that they work the same way we do to at least some extent. So I have no doubt that at a fundamental level birds have something like our emotional states driving their behavior - it feels right and proper to make a nest & lay eggs, it is satisfying to do so, and stressful if circumstances prevent it. The interesting question is the cognitive control that’s superimposed on that - how much they understand about what they are doing, what level of awareness/consciousness they have (and whether that matters).
Exactly. Consider sex. We all know we have the instinct in order to reproduce, but what’s happening in an individual’s head? Generally we aren’t thinking “I need to have children” but “I sure would like to f that hot babe”. In many cases we even do things to subvert the instinct’s purpose, such as by using contraception.
Very interesting question, a birds brain is warm blooded and fuelled by twice the oxygen as a mammal while I croc is cold blooded and using half as much oxygen as a mammal. Birds need to be smarter than crocs to achieve flight however at the expense of some lifespan. Have you ever wondered how a bird just mises your car windscreen, maybe a bird feel smarter or just experience time at a different rate