Sheskis

“MIGRATION IS ANOTHER TRADE-OFF. Birds that migrate have smaller brains than their sedentary relatives. This makes sense, as a brain that consumes a lot of energy and develops slowly would be too costly for birds that travel a lot.”
― Jennifer Ackerman, The Genius of Birds

“New research shows that when we recall an event, the place cells in our hippocampus that store the location of that event fire again, helping us to locate a memory in both space and time. This explains why retracing your steps can help you remember what you were looking for.”
― Jennifer Ackerman, The Genius of Birds

“In fact, we owe the expression “pecking order” to studies of the social relations among chickens by the Norwegian zoologist Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe, who found that pecking orders are ladderlike, with the top rung conferring great privilege in the form of food and safety, and the bottom rung fraught with vulnerability and risk.”
― Jennifer Ackerman, The Genius of Birds

“It’s a notion that was proposed three decades ago by Jane Goodall and her colleague Hans Kummer. The pair made a plea for measuring a wild animal’s intelligence by looking at its ability to find solutions to problems in its natural setting. What’s needed is an ecological rather than a laboratory measure of intelligence, they suggested. This can be found in an animal’s ability to innovate in its own environment, “to find a solution to a novel problem, or a novel solution to an old one.”
― Jennifer Ackerman, The Genius of Birds