Members of the crow family and that includes the Jays, the Jackdaws the
Magpies and Ravens are highly intelligent and when it comes to their
ability to think and to problem-solve we found that they are clever as
chimpanzees. That's why we call them feathered Apes. We've been working with
Eurasian Jays they're the ones you often see in your back garden usually in pairs.
They're brightly coloured and they have the most exquisite moustache. We've been
studying two behaviours in the Eurasian Jays - the first we call caching this is
the ability to hide food, store it and remember over long periods of time where
they've hidden it. What we've discovered about their caching behaviour is that
these birds have remarkable long lasting memories of where they stashed or hidden
their food. They don't just remember where they've hidden it they also
remember what kinds of foods they've hidden where and how long ago and even
who was watching when they cached or hid the food.
What's more they can even plan ahead knowing where to stash food for
tomorrow's breakfast. That's interesting because the ability to plan ahead has
been found in very few species other than humans. In fact it's only in the
Jays and chimpanzees. The other behaviour we've been looking at is food sharing
because during the breeding season the male will feed his female with tasty
morsels of the food that she wants. The way in which we conduct our tests is
that the male gets the opportunity to watch what his female is eating and then
once she's full of that food what he has to do is give her the opposite food. He
can only do this if he's watched her so to give an analogy imagine that you've
just seen me eat lots of cheese so I don't want any more cheese now so what
you need to do is give me apples instead of cheese and that's the equivalent to
the experiments that we've done with the Jays. You often think of Jays and other
crows as being very raucous because they just have a series of calls
but in fact they have very complex secretive songs like a series of
whispers - sweet nothings if you like. What we're starting to discover is that the
Jays are virtuoso mimics and they incorporate all kinds of interesting
sounds into their songs including human speech. Romero for example will sing I
love you on a good day. Hello Romy, hello gorgeous -What's up? What you doing? what you doing - so we now know
that the Jays are highly intelligent and that's very interesting because it's not
just our close relatives, our primate cousins that are intelligent it's these
very distantly related birds with whom we shared a common ancestor over 300
million years ago. It's interesting to know exactly what the similarities and
differences between our minds and those alien minds are and that's one of the
things we're interested in investigating further. Of course to do so we need
detailed observations and very carefully planned problem-solving tasks in order
to find out what exactly the birds are thinking and how they solve problems. So
next time you see the Jays in your garden think of them as the feathered
Apes on your bird table perhaps you can do some careful observations too to see
whether or not they'll cache and they'll share food with a partner and also
whether they engage in this vocal frolicking.