Birds seem to be approaching the intellectual level of humans
In this connection, it makes sense to closely watch other birds’ behavior. Contrary to the general belief, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, the film where a flock of seagulls terrorizes a city, is not at all an absolute fantasy. In England ’s Gloucester , a seagull aggressively attacked Don Weston for over five years. The man never devastated birds’ nests, and what is more he even once saved a seagull nestling that dropped out of a nest.
The aggressive seagull, very likely the one that developed into an adult bird from the nestling that Weston once saved, crapped on his clothes and dived with the hope to break the man’s head. And it is strange that the bird hated its rescuer so much. May it be so that it supposed the one who saved its life must also take care of its food? Mr. Weston invented various tricks to get out of the seagull’s sight – changed clothes, wore a wig and even had high-heeled shoes – but all in vain. The bird immediately recognized him even in a huge crowd and attacked the 60-year-old man so violently that he had to escape.
It is true that people really know little about wild birds. The married couple, Jean and Terry Greening in Britain’s Devon say that their domestic bullfinch named Butch can talk very much like a parrot.
Researchers suppose that people could learn much new surprising things if birds were studied closer. Highly likely birds’ talkativeness develops because people continuously talk to them.
Being a nestling, Butch dropped out of its nest and was taken to the Sea Birds Care House in southern Devon. Later, all attempts to teach the nestling to live in wildlife failed. So, Wildlife officials gave Butch to Terry end Jean Greening, a couple who have a garden aviary behind their bungalow. Soon, Butch began to talk. Jean Greening greets the birds in the aviary with whistles, kissing noises, and the phrase, “Who’s a pretty boy?” One day, out of the blue, Butch piped up and said to Terry Greening, “Who’s u pretty boy?”
Ever heard about pigeons that can discriminate paintings of Monet and Picasso? A pigeon distinguished between a Picasso and a Monet painting in experiments at Cardiff University in Britain . The pigeon may have held an idea (Picasso’s style) in its head to make the distinction. Japanese researcher Shigeru Watanabe who conducts these experiments thinks pigeons are wonderful connoisseurs of art.
Recently, researchers ask themselves a question if they have exhausted all resources to establish good communication between humans and animals. Some years ago, statements about telepathy contacts with a parrot sounded really incredible for majority of us while today influential researchers and research institutes want to study the issue of bird intellect.
A couple of months ago, The Guardian published the results of recent researches in species biology. American researchers suppose that humans won the superiority over the rest biological species basically thanks to their sense of hearing.
Translated by Maria Gousseva
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