African Grey Parrots are thought to have an equivalent IQ to that of a five year old child.
Our African Grey would demonstrate his intelligence through a well developed sense of humour…
If the cat was sleeping in the livingroom he would quietly come down from his cage, sneak up behind the cat, and then scare the hell out of it by doing his rabid Doberman impersonation. As the cat bolted he would stroll back to his cage laughing his head off…
He would converse with a purpose rather then just mimic thi8ngs he had heard.
He especially loved messing with the other animals and my wife by pretending to be me.
In that kea article it says that African greys can actually carry out rudimentary conversations in English. That’s pretty astonishing.
Meanwhile in the Sunday Times this morning there’s an article about a driver who caused a three-car pile-up because he was turning round to tell his cockatiel to shut up.
Go to the Scientific American Frontiers video I linked above. It’s about a 10-minute clip from the show, which gives a pretty good overview of what Alex can do.
Bernd Heinrich’s “The Mind of The Raven” is an interesting book detailing how the large black birds behave…it has some really insightful stories and research.
The problem with tests is the test would be designed to favor certain species of birds over others. For instance, if part of a bird intelligence test included ability to swim out to an floating object, submerge with it and drop it into an underwater hole, well, very few birds would be able to take the test.
Now that was a very broad, absurd example to lead to the next point:
Some birds would be predisposed to behave in certain ways that would either give them advantages or disadvantages in the tests. Crows certainly cannot talk with the same ability of the Moluccan, for instance. Some birds I’ve read about can readily identify geometrical shapes once they’ve learned them. But perhaps birds that would not do well in geometrical shape recognition would perform better at dropping walnut shells on roadways as mentioned above.
Test design is almost an art. And to test animals without understanding how animals perceive and exactly what their physical limitations are–we’re just on the cutting edge of that kind of knowledge–becomes at best a circus show. Remember the bird and duck in Peter and the Wolf? The bird boasts about how well he can fly and the duck boasts about how well he can swim. They taunt each other with their separate superior skills.
An excellent book by an unusual man who is probably the world’s expert on ravens. He states that essentially all humans who have had ravens as pets believe they are the most intelligent animal.
He compares problem-solving in crows and ravens. Problems that crows solve after much trial and error are occasionally solved by ravens on the first attempt.
Albatrosses’ flying skills are certainly impressive. But it’s reasonably clear that this is instinct at work, more than intelligence.
I think my favorite albatross fact concerns the Laysan albatrosses that nest on the Hawaiian islands. Satellite tracking has shown that they occasionally commute to islands off California and then back to Hawaii with a stomach full of food for their chick. The round trip takes something like 5-6 days.
It makes total sense to me that all creatures are evolving toward intelligence and self-awareness (humans just happened to do it first as far as we know ). However, the part of this site that states that “Victor was the first animal in the world to believe in God”, was “sad that people didn’t believe in the bible enough”, and “During the last day of his life he spent most of it standing in front of and staring at a picture of Jesus”, makes me suspect the rest of the author’s interpretations, and/or Victor’s training, were, just a tad, biased.