Bird Brain

This picture is a screenshot of the video

I think this is a very interesting video to watch. What we did in the past was to read articles about animals science, and this is a video about animal science. To be more specific, this is a video about bird brain. This video talks about both the birds’ intelligence as well as their emotions. I personally think this way of learning information about animal science is better than read articles, since we can visualize the process of the research, thus help us better understand the situation. There are many different kinds of research involved in this video. For the animal intelligence, the scientists used several versions of string pull tests, to see if birds have the ability to figure out how to get food by using the skills they have not been trained to have in the past. The bird who involved in the string pull tests is Rio. For the social behavior part, the scientists set up a research to see if the birds have the ability to learn from other birds that are in the same social group. One bird is trained to get the food by using a specific way, and researchers will see if other birds can learn the way of getting food by watching other birds’ behaviors. The researcher also arranged a task to test the cooperation skills of birds. The cooperation task is that some birds should keep the lid open in order to help other birds in the social group to eat food. This is a showing of “social groups increase intelligence”. John Marzluff, a professor of wildlife science at the University of Washington and the author of “In the Company of Crows and Ravens”, believes that “they[the birds] are all working to the same goal. They[all birds in a social group] get to eat. For the birds emotion, some birds probably have emotions, since we can tell if they are happy or sad. However, it is hard to tell if they have emotions similar to human beings. Christina Riehl, an assistant professor at Princeton University whose research focus is on birds, said that “The simplest explanation [of why some birds are emotional] may be that they’re seeing the world in much the same way that we[humans] do”. The video also shows that crows has the skill to communicate with others by conducting the human mask test. There is an excerpt that I like the most is To become an expert of animal science, we need to know as much information as we could, and we really need to understand the purpose of each research that researchers performed on animals.