Just curious? Crows? Parrots? Blue Jays? Mynah Birds?
Crows have demonstrated the abilty to use tools and are found in many different places. So they seem a likely candidate
Well, I can assure you it ain’t doves.
Probably the African Grey Parrot-at least if you’re talking about vocabulary.
African Greys are arguably the most intelligent. In addition to learning to mimic, they have been demonstrated, in at least a few cases, to have some understaning of the human words they learn to use. That doesn’t mean they’ll be studying astrophysics or earning PhD’s any time soon, but it’s darn impessive anyhow.
In North America, I’d vote for the crow as a possible genius-bird candidate. It’s not because crows in captivity can be taught to speak or taught tricks - it’s their behavior in the wild where they have been observed to not only use tools, but to learn to use the tools of man to their benefit that I find most impressvie. Like delibrately putting stuff in a road so traffic will squash it for them and make it easier to get into the tasty bits. The also know when they should gang up to take down some prey or a threat as opposed to going it alone, and that takes some brain power, too.
There was a rather non-scientific animal intelligence test on the BBC a few weeks ago. The winner was Kea from New Zealand. They were quite incredible, solving problems (of how to get food) using deduction skills and cooperating with each other, over and over again. Read the story. Awesomely clever.
The link doesn’t specify what fiendish intelligence tests they came up with for the Kea but I have seen a crow do what the Kea did that impressed the wildlife photographers.
This was likewise form a nature show. Some guy was way up north filming wildlife. In the morning he’d go out on a lake to his ice hole and set a fishing line in the water. He’d then go off for the day to do his thing and return in the afternoon to collect dinner from the fishing hole. This was routine till one day he stopped catching fish. He figured there must be some other campers stealing his food. Since he had film equipment with him he hid a camera to watch the fishing hole and catch the perpetrators in the act.
You can see where this is going…the thief was a crow. Not only did the crow identify the fishing hole as a source of food it learned to test whether anything had been caught (it’d pull on the line…no weight it wouldn’t bother pulling the line up). When a fish was on the other end the crow would pull on the line and step on it so it could let go with its beak and grab again till the fish was out of the hole. Once the fish was out the crow would step on the fish to hold it still and work the hook out so it could carry the fish to a nice safe spot to eat.
Watching the whole thing was pretty remarkable especially considering the crow was pretty adept at the whole procedure. There were no false starts or standing around puzzling what to do. It just came down and did its thing like a professional. Very cool.
As an aside I recently had a Pit thread about crows that were tearing tree bark off a tree and dropping it on my head (or trying to so I’d go away). I won’t retell the story but yet another indication of their intelligence.
I saw a thing on PBS a little while ago about crows. They had one segement that showed some kind of cat eating something it had killed, with a bunch of crows watching it. One crow kepy flying down, grabbing the cat’s tail and pulling it, then flying away. Eventually the cat chased the crow and all the other crows swooped down and feasted on the carcass. So I’d vote crow.
Well, in Animal Planet’s “The Most” (or is it “The Best”?) the crow came in 5th or 6th place and some other bird came in first. Since this was a totally subjective show I still vote crow because what the crow did impressed me infinitely more than what the other bird did (can’t even remember what kind of bird it was.)
It showed crows picking up some sort of nuts with extremely hard shells (walnuts maybe?) and flying over an intersection dropping them in just the right spot to get run over by a car. The crow would then fly to the sidewalk and stare at the “Walk”-man / “Don’t Walk”-hand and when it changed to the appropriate hand he would strut out there and get his meal!
Very impressive if you ask me. I would love to have a pet crow.
The test was as follows (from my memory, but it was only a few weeks ago): in the first test, the food was in a wooden box with a glass panel. The glass panel could be slid up by pulling on a string. BUT the thing was built so that the moment the bird pulling the string tried to get at the food, the panel dropped down again. It was physically impossible for a single bird to lift the door up. So they cooperated: one bird would pull the string while the other one got the food out. Then they’d trade places. And they worked this out in about five minutes - they hopped around examining the apparatus, tilting their heads to look at it, then tried on their own for a couple of times, then went into cooperation mode. The experimenters increased the complexity of the task several times (I was out of the room at the time, so I only heard the VO and missed how this was physically done, but each one seemed to involve a higher degree of problem-solving and cooperation), and each time the birds solved the task in between 5 and 10 minutes.
I vote for crows, cos I saw a TV prog recently and they made their own tools to get food and stuff.
Here’s another article:
If we can believe Slug Signorino’s illustration’s, there’s a really smart one called Cecil Adams. 
My wife’s pretty smart, too.
I can’t remember the name of the show I saw this morning. I have only seen it a couple of times and it may even be a local production. It’s some guy who just sits behind a table covered with all sorts of animals (cats, dogs, parrots, rabbits, etc.) and discusses pets and answers call in questions.
On the show this morning the host had a guest on who was there to discuss how various pets have been domesticated. When discussing birds this very question came up.
The guest said that the crow, raven, etc. family were the smartest birds overall but that the smartest individual species is the African Grey Parrot.
In looking up info on smart birdies, I came across this website: Victor the Budgerigar, wherein the mind of one bird (Victor the budgerigar, of course) is examined. Assuming the interpretations of the numerous recordings (Victor was, apparently, quite the talker; click on the “his recordings” link at the top to listen to him in action) are accurate, it would seem that there’s more to our feathered friends than meets the eye.
Behold, Alex, the African Grey Parrot.
Now that’s a smart parrot. There are videos of Alex in action here at the Scientific American Frontiers web site.
Having owned an African Grey, I can attest to their startling intelligence.
Bipper, the blue-fronted Amazon.
Grouchy little green bastard. Never forgave us for having children. Now loves my older daughter. When she moves out she gets to take the noisy horror.
If he could get out of his cage, he would kill me in my sleep.
Here’s another candidate - the albatross.
The albatross knows how to “tack” (sail against the wind by soaring in a particular zig-zag pattern). That sure seems impressive.
In all fairness the albatross can attain wingspans of up uo 12 feet. So, maybe ALL birds KNOW how to tack, but they don’t have the wingspan to do so.
I, for one, welcome our new crow overlords!