Some birds have human attributes

The New York Review of Books has an interesting review of “What It’s Like to Be a Bird” by David Sibley. I don’t know much about birds, so I was amazed at some of the things birds can do. Some examples: 

“Crows and parrots perform as well as dogs in tests of reasoning and learning.”

New Caledonian crows can assemble compound tools out of more than one element; children cannot do this until at least the age of five. 

Birds see differently from us. They can see ultraviolet light. 

Birds can hear a wider range of sounds than us. They communicate very actively by calls and songs. Calls enable them transmit socially important information, such as the approach of a dangerous predator. Birdsong contains more elaborate messages, usually related to breeding. 

Nest-building techniques seem to be inherited, as they are constructed the same for generations whether in captivity or in the free world. 

Often their memories are better than ours. “Clark’s nutcracker, a member of the crow family native to the mountains of the western United States, can hide over 30,000 seeds and recall their precise locations many months later. These birds not only can locate their food caches but also conceal them from rivals, and they know to retrieve first those likely to spoil.” 

The bar-tailed godwit migrates every year from Alaska to New Zealand, a distance of over seven thousand miles. And, they do it non-stop.