Têtes de linotte?: Innovation et intelligence chez les oiseaux

by Louis Lefebvre

Pourquoi s’intéresser à l’intelligence? Parce que c’est à cette caractéristique que nous attribuons notre succès sur terre. Pourquoi s’intéresser à l’intelligence des corbeaux, perroquets et autres génies à plumes qu’on a souvent traités de « têtes de linotte »? Parce que si, comme le pensait Darwin, il n’y a qu’une différence de degré entre l’intelligence humaine et celle des autres animaux, il est important de comprendre d’où vient la nôtre. Nous connaissons Louis Lefebvre romancier, mais nous ignorons trop souvent qu’il s’agit d’un des plus grands spécialistes au monde de l’intelligence des oiseaux. Ses travaux ont révolutionné son champ d’études, et les méthodes qu’il a mises au point pour les oiseaux ont ensuite été appliquées avec succès aux primates. Il retrace ici son fascinant parcours de chercheur, dont une bonne partie a eu pour cadre l’institut de recherche que l’Université McGill possède à la Barbade. En quoi consiste l’intelligence? Pour Louis Lefebvre, la réponse tient en deux  innovation et techniques. Il nous fait découvrir, avec amusement et incrédulité, d’étonnantes histoires d’innovation chez les oiseaux : des mésanges qui apprennent à déboucher des bouteilles de lait aux géospizes qui se transforment en vampires ou aux courlis qui cassent les œufs d’albatros avec des cailloux. Comment se transmettent ces innovations? Par diffusion culturelle? Par transmission génétique? Quelle différence y a-t-il entre le cerveau d’un oiseau innovateur et celui d’un oiseau non innovateur? Les oiseaux innovateurs peuvent-ils plus facilement coloniser un pays où on les a récemment introduits? Quel oiseau est le plus innovateur, celui qui reste au même endroit tout l’hiver ou celui qui migre vers le sud? Voici quelques-unes des questions auxquelles Louis Lefebvre répond ici. Elles nous mènent aux constats suivants, aussi inéluctables que troublants : l’intelligence a émergé plusieurs fois au cours de l’évolution de façon indépendante dans divers groupes d’animaux. Notre intelligence n’est pas unique.

Genres: Birds, Nonfiction, Science, Animals, Biology, Nature, Natural History

228 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2023

Reviews

[Richard Derus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Real Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: For readers of Jennifer Ackerman comes a captivating exploration of avian intelligence that challenges traditional wisdom about animal cognition.

Surveying a wide variety of birds, including crows, finches, tits, and parrots, Louis Lefebvre, a world-renowned expert in animal behaviour, describes the remarkable innovations and problem-solving abilities of species often dismissed as ‘featherbrains’. From crows using cars as nutcrackers to cockatoos crafting tools, Lefebvre reveals how birds exhibit creativity, social learning, and even cultural transmission — traits once thought to be exclusive to humans and other primates.

Blending his decades of scientific research with engaging anecdotes, Lefebvre examines the evolutionary forces that have shaped avian intelligence. He explores how birds adapt to urban environments, innovate in response to challenges, and pass down knowledge across generations. This goldmine of bird behaviour yields an ‘innovation quotient’ widely used by researchers to measure and rank how innovative a bird species is. Using his encyclopaedic knowledge, Lefebvre answers questions such as:

When a bird species learns a new technique, how do their innovations spread?
Why is research on bird cognition being used to train AI models and even robots?
What makes certain birds endlessly innovative while others stubbornly repeat the same behaviors?

When a bird species learns a new technique, how do their innovations spread? Why is research on bird cognition being used to train AI models and even robots? What makes certain birds endlessly innovative while others stubbornly repeat the same behaviours? With vivid storytelling and groundbreaking insights, A A Bird’s IQ invites readers to reconsider their perceptions, celebrating the ingenuity of birds and highlighting the interconnectedness of all intelligent life.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I loved this read. I am, as I think those familiar with my writing over the years will know, a corvidophile...crows particularly but ravens and magpies as well...as I find their intelligence palpable. It is obvious to me that I am in the presence of a sentient being when I'm around corvids, there's that recognition of fellowship that really can't be denied. Or I can't deny it anyway.

Author Lefebvre seems to have had a similar experience though not specifically with corvids. His research into the intelligence of birds is built on a much longer tradition of inquiry into the subject than I ever suspected. It's a big part of my pleasure in reading this book to learn as much as I did about the history of research into avian intelligence. It felt as though I was sitting in an armchair next to him, having a wide-ranging conversation about science and its history wherein he answered my questions without my actually vocalizing them. It sounds fanciful, I know, but it was my emotional experience of this kind of intimacy that made the read so different from other popularizations of important scientific study.

It really isn't a bit surprising that I'd have this experience while reading A Bird’s IQ when you learn that Author Lefebvre is also a novelist...one nominated twice for Canada's Governor General's Award for French-language fiction, so clearly possessed of solid narrative-creation chops. I liked the experience I had learning about the intelligence of dinosaurs which is where I'm clearly going to go since I'm still an eight-year-old when it comes to dinosaurs. (And yes, birds are unquestionably dinosaurs.) It can, however, lead to a bit of prolixity about what the kids (ie anyone under fifty) seem to like calling "side quests" into matters like a scientist's name-change, or the challenges of gathering usable data from birding-centered magazines published in England between the World Wars. Fascinating, but better left in the source notes.

If I have a moment of...hesitation, let's call it, about some of Author Lefebvre's contentious assertions about cultural transmission of knowledge in bird populations, it's one that Author Lefebvre foresaw and forestalled by couching his contention of this fact in careful terms. The anecdotal evidence for this method of learning in bird populations is voluminous. It's not rigorous scientific data, and Author Lefebvre, to his credit, never tries to present it as such. He also very specifically states he does not share Rupert Sheldrake's more controversial ideas about how that kind of knowledge transmission could take place. As I am a bit uncomfortable with presenting that body of knowledge as scientific myownself, I am in harmony with Author Lefebvre on this point.

As I am very much a satisfied reader of this book, I want to assure all who read this review that it's not perfect in my eyes, or in the author's. It is an interim progress report on a career's-worth of experience, knowledge-gathering, and synthesis. It's well presented. It's well sourced. It's mae to bring fundamentals of the topic to broad attention, and couched in language that does this unintimidatingly well. It also affords the author's scientific peers access to his resources and his thinking leadiing to the conclusions presented...all in the same sentences and style. And, of the greatest value to both audiences, Author Lefebvre does not present his case as closed, does not claim a unique and conversation-ending breakthrough is in the text.

He is too sensible of work needing to be done and too respectful of the contributors to the overall field of research into intelligence. I was never more surprised in the read than when I learned how much two-way influence into robotics and "AI" there was. A story of how we got to where we are, and how much where we are has resonances beyond the obvious, in using our own intelligence to understand intelligence, expand its impact, and...I hope...gain humility about ourselves by learning about and from those unlike us.

[Ed Erwin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some birds are impressively intelligent. Yet, intelligence is hard to define: IQ even more so. So this book instead looks at examples of innovation in various bird species. Some of the examples of innovation are just a bird seen eating something we don't expect it to eat. But there are also examples of tool use, tool modification, advance planning, intentional deception, etc., in certain species. Corvids and some parrots. But, as the author points out, innovation doesn't always work out for the best, and some very, very dumb birds (like Turkeys) are doing just fine without thinking.

Pretty interesting, but dry. (I don't ever want to hear again about the relative numbers of neurons in various bird species palladium.)

The original French title translates perfectly to "Birdbrains?". Given that the author avoids much talk of intelligence and pretty much dismisses IQ tests, I can only imagine the English title was provided by marketers.

[Adrianne · Rating 2 out of 5]

While I didn't mind reaching for the phone to look up each bird's image, having more photos in the book would have been great. That said, I learned about quite a few new birds and took away some interesting facts on others.

[Celeste Peters · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lots of interesting information contained here but I found there to be rather too much minute detail to stay engaged for long periods at a time.

[Danielle Gerard · Rating 4 out of 5]

J'y ai appris beaucoup de trucs et j'ai adoré ce livre mais malgré la vulgarisation sa lecture est complexe. À la suite de cette lecture on ne voit plus les oiseaux de la même façon.

[RavenBuddha]

Lefebvre treats innovation as a workable comparative measure of intelligence, following Goodall and Kummer in defining it as solving a new problem, finding a new solution to an old one, or exploiting a resource not previously used by the group (p. 31). His team compiled thousands of feeding innovations across bird species and adjusted comparisons for differences in research effort, with a parallel database built for primates. Corvids dominate the avian innovation database, while ratites and galliforms occupy its lower end (pp. 233–35). Parrots stand out on different evidence: they have the largest brains relative to body size, as well as the largest pallia and highest pallial neuron counts (p. 185), while Corvidae is the family that most fully displays every trait of intelligence across Lefebvre's different measures (p. 201). The innovations themselves can be striking, from individual woodpecker finches using bark shavings to scrape moss or modifying newly available plants into more effective tools (p. 56) to keas repeatedly overcoming redesigned stoat traps with digging, sticks, and strands of mesh until a tamperproof design finally held in 2018 (p. 181).

The book connects these behavioral differences to the structure and evolution of avian brains. Absolute brain size is misleading because larger animals generally have larger brains, while a simple brain-to-body ratio can make small animals appear disproportionately large-brained; Lefebvre therefore compares brain size after statistically correcting for body size, illustrated by the phylogenetic chart on p. 44. The pallium serves functions comparable to the mammalian cortex, and the nidopallium caudolaterale, or NCL, is the avian equivalent of our prefrontal cortex (p. 46). More innovative species tend to show greater NMDA 2B receptor expression, more pallial neurons, and larger brains and nidopallia (p. 53). Experimental tasks complement these correlations: trap-tube tests probe causal understanding (p. 67), while New Caledonian crows can assemble multi-tool sequences (p. 207) and flexibly push or pull depending on how a problem is arranged (p. 210). Corvids also rank first in all eight categories of technical innovation, and across bird families the diversity of technical innovations correlates with brain size more strongly than merely consuming novel foods does. Because the same pattern occurs in primates, Lefebvre calls technical intelligence the most powerful driver of brain evolution in both groups (p. 212).

Innovation can also become culture when discoveries spread through social learning and are refined rather than merely copied unchanged (p. 24). New Caledonian crow toolmaking provides a particularly rich example: tool-oriented behavior appears innate, but the exact form and effectiveness of tools depend on practice and observation of adults, while complex techniques are culturally transmitted (pp. 203-5). Innovation does not exhaust intelligence, however. Clark's nutcracker can cache more than 33,000 pine seeds in 2,500 locations and recall them a year later, illustrating a highly specialized form of cognition (p. 101). Development matters as well: altricial birds, whose young develop for longer before independence, tend to have larger brains and far more pallial neurons than comparable precocial species, a pattern Lefebvre links to the greater neurogenesis permitted by longer early development (pp. 130-31, 187). These traits form part of a slower life-history strategy associated with more neurons, longer lives, and fewer offspring, whereas faster strategies emphasize early maturity and large broods (p. 243). The tradeoff is that long generation times can reduce the resilience of large-brained populations when they decline (p. 187).

[Maggie Eisenberger · Rating 4 out of 5]

Absolutely fascinating anecdotes and examples of numerous species of birds and the various ways they have been observed, either in the wild or in research facilities, demonstrating some sort of intelligence. Some use tools, some make tools, some show signs of planning ahead, some anticipate the actions of others, some engage in deception, some partner with another bird or even another species to achieve their goal - the list goes on, and every one is a wow. These stories are interspersed with very technical descriptions of the areas of a bird's brain and comparisons of the number of connections they have in the relevant areas and how much they weigh, which other birds they are most closely related to - stuff I eventually ended up skimming through because it didn't add anything to my enjoyment of the book. If you are into it - it's all in there.

[Ellie O'Day · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lefebvre's career as a novelist as well as a scientist has given us an engaging book about birds (and sometimes primates) and how we might measure their intelligence. Some science writers earnestly provide an exhausting sequence of examples to make their point, but I prefer that they do some pruning. Lefebvre strikes the right balance, sharing some bizarre examples along with amazing accomplishments. And why "birdbrain" should be a compliment.

[William Dury · Rating 3 out of 5]

More “how birds figure stuff out” or”birds figuring stuff out.” Animals are ranked by “innovation,” roughly defined as finding a solution for a new problem or finding a new solution to an old problem. We are led thru a wonderland of birds figuring stuff out, mainly to do with food. They are clever little creatures but the incessant stories of murder lead one to an unexpected conclusion as to the relatively civilized nature of human beings, or at least to contemplate (but surely not ascend to) the higher plane of vegetarianism. This is not noted by our guide who treats Man as an intruder into paradise and inevitable destroyer who will eventually leave the birds in charge. Ah, the sinful nature of man! I’m sure that the birds will do much better than we did.

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I live in the city now, so don’t see as many birds I used to on a daily basis. But I really enjoy learning anything I can about birds and this title was fantastic for that.

[Marcia McLaughlin]

More academic than I want.

[Clivemichael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Packed with statistics and entertaining factoids, almost too much to take in.

[Michele · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very science-y, so a few pages at a time. But full of fascinating information for anyone deeply interested in birds.

[Catherine Dubé · Rating 3 out of 5]

Avec cet ouvrage de vulgarisation scientifique un peu NICHÉ (pun intended), Louis Lefebvre, chercheur émérite et romancier, nous invite à découvrir un sujet fascinant: l'intelligence et la faculté d'innovation des oiseaux. Sorte de petit traité d'éthologie aviaire, ce court ouvrage (même pas 200 pages) s'avère néanmoins costaud pour le néophyte. En s'appuyant sur les recherches de son équipe et de ses collègues chercheurs, Lefebvre donne à voir un aperçu de l'état de la recherche sur l'intelligence et l'innovation chez les oiseaux. Si le propos est accessible il n'en demeure pas moins sérieux et parfois un peu aride. Heureusement pour nous, l'auteur n'hésite pas à déployer quelques traits d'humour pour nous garder réceptifs. On apprend beaucoup de choses dans ce petit livre. Je remarque que l'auteur fait preuve d'une belle sensibilité quant aux biais possibles de sa discipline. J'ai apprécié son humilité et le profond respect qu'il semble témoigner envers ses pairs, collègues mais aussi envers les ornithologues amateurs, dont il reconnait l'apport important. À lire si vous avez un intérêt particulier envers les oiseaux ou les sciences cognitives.

[Sabine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Très intéressant mais pas toujours facile à lire même si c est très bien vulgarisé.