If you learned that there were islands full of hyper-intelligent birds, you would be forgiven for assuming that they must be parrots or crows, the stars of the brainy bird world. But in the Falkland Islands, near the Argentine coast, you'll find incredibly intelligent falcons called southern caranchos.
By adapting tests originally designed to assess cockatoos' cognition, Katie Harrington, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna, found that carachs can solve problems as well as parrots. The results were published in the journal Current Biology.
Harrington runs the Johnny Rook Project, which gets its name from the local English nickname for the birds. Of the 15 caranchos he tested, all of them solved at least one puzzle and 10 of them solved all eight.
“These caranches were able to solve tasks that some of the tool-using parrots couldn't solve,” Harrington said.
Some animals are nervous around scientists, which can make testing difficult. With caranchos, Harrington had the opposite problem. He said he had to keep curious birds away while another was tested using a Plexiglas puzzle box that challenged the carachs to pull, push, slide or do anything else to access pieces of meat.
Given their good performance and boldness, southern carachs represent a promising new model species for studying avian cognition.
Not many scientists have investigated the intellectual capacity of falcons, which are closely related to parrots and crows. Harrington attributes this to its raptor label, which implies a life of “perch, hunt, sleep, repeat.”
She suspects that the caranchos developed their cunning to deal with the harsh conditions on the Falkland Islands. In summer, caranchos can feed on colonies of seabirds. But those birds migrate in winter. Ingenuity could help a hungry caracho in difficult times.
Their boldness has gotten the hawks into trouble with sheep farmers. “There used to be a reward for their spikes,” Harrington said.
Today, public perception has motivated legal protections for birds. This is important because caranchos have a limited range. They are found only on the outer islands of the Malvinas and Tierra del Fuego, at the southern tip of South America.
Harrington hopes to test some birds a year after the experiment to see how strong their memories are.
By studying birds, Harrington said, “there is another door we can open to comparative cognitive research.”
By: DARREN INCORVAIA
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/7062322, IMPORTING DATE: 2024-01-09 20:45:07
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