With their small brains and seemingly primitive behavior, birds were long regarded as not the smartest of animals. Yet as our exploration of bird intelligence revealed, scientists now regard birds as having similar cognitive capacities to the great apes and dolphins!

Of all the avian family’s extraordinary talents, few shine so brightly as their ability to remember. It turns out that some birds would likely beat even the sharpest human minds in a memory test!

While this may seem hard to believe, the way you hear the term ‘bird brains’ will be forever changed after reading about these supreme masters of bird memory.

The Crafty Jay, and Their Acorn Antics

If you’ve ever stood in wonder before a centuries-old oak tree and wondered how it started its life, the answer may well be that a jay planted it.

Amazingly, many oaks, conifers, and beech trees owe their beginnings to jays that buried them in the ground for hard times to come. If the seeds are not needed (or perhaps occasionally forgotten!), they sprout and eventually become fruitful trees for future generations of jays to feed from.

This behavior, known as ‘caching’ is a common strategy among many jay species and other members of the crow family and allows the birds to survive lean times, with those with the keenest memories especially likely to prosper.

But perhaps even more remarkable is the jay’s well-documented strategies to deceive other birds that may be intending to steal their stash! If a jay sees another jay watching it, it may move its acorns to another hiding place, or even store inedible decoys to confuse its competitor. Now that’s some very sly thinking!

The African Grey Parrot – A Potential Testifier of Crime?

Parrots and parakeets are well-known for their startling intelligence, and among them, the grey parrot ranks as one of the smartest.

American scientist Irene Pepperberg‘s groundbreaking work with Alex the parrot showed that gray parrots have similar cognitive abilities to a four to six-year-old child. By remembering hundreds of words, labeling objects, and connecting human faces with voices, grey parrots have proven to have not only an impressive memory but also an ability to use it for learning complex tasks.

While parrots appear to be able to remember previous owners after decades apart, they also, sadly seem to suffer from trauma years after shocking events or mistreatment.

Curiously, grey parrots have been known to memorize and repeat phrases from violent incidents, and have even been considered for use in testimony in murder trials where they continue to repeat the last words of a victim weeks after the crime was committed.

This video where an African grey may be uttering the argument between a husband and wife before a shooting also attests to the species’ capacity for lasting emotional disturbance after a shocking event.

Black-Capped Chickadees – A Tiny Bird With a Huge Hippocampus!

While the crow and parrot families may be the superstars of bird intelligence and memory, certain songbirds are also proving that they’re capable of similarly impressive feats.

Black-capped chickadees, a backyard bird found across the Northern United States and Canada, have attracted considerable attention from scientists in recent years for their remarkable ability to memorize thousands of hiding places of seeds.

Attaching a microdrive to the birds’ heads, scientists monitoring the brain activity in chickadees were amazed by the explosive activity in their large hippocampus which seems to allow these birds to store vast numbers of episodic memories.

Not only do the chickadees remember where they hide food, but they also seem to be able to remember which types of food they stored, showing a definite preference for retrieving high-calorie food items as temperatures drop and their energy demands increase.

Homing Pigeons

Homing pigeons, otherwise known as carrier pigeons are renowned for their uncanny ability to find their way back home over long distances. Selectively bred from the rock dove (Columba livia), humans took advantage of the bird’s unwavering determination to return to its origins.

Believe it or not, homing pigeons have been recorded to cover up to around 1,100 miles to return home. That’s roughly the distance from Kansas City to New York City or nearly half the breadth of the entire United States!

While carrier pigeons are thought to chiefly use the position of the sun and an internal map based on the Earth’s magnetic field to navigate, they must still wield an incredibly accurate memory to memorize the place that they’re aiming to return to.

This remarkable talent for navigation has been exploited by humans since ancient times. More than 3,000 years ago, carrier pigeons were used for mail delivery in Ancient Egypt, and the sport of racing pigeons is thought to have originated at a similar time.

Before telegraphs and telephones were widely implemented, carrier pigeons were used to report news and important messages at impressive speed. They were also utilized for this purpose during both world wars!

Woodpeckers

While woodpeckers are excellent at prizing open trees to retrieve the insects that live there, many species also rely heavily on a rich supply of nuts and seeds, cleverly stashed away where other birds and mammals can’t retrieve them.

In autumn, the red-bellied woodpecker busily caches food items ranging from hazel and beech nuts, to leftover agricultural corn, to pet food in deep tree crevices, fence posts, and even the siding of houses! Using its long bill, it attempts to place food items out of reach from potential competitors.

But because other birds and mammals like squirrels and chipmunks may still try to raid a cache that’s been discovered, the woodpeckers need to hide their food in a variety of locations that then need to be remembered.

Perhaps to overcome the problem of memorizing the locations of their caches, the acorn woodpecker has hit upon a different strategy. By storing thousands of acorns in a single tree, and guarding it vigilantly against all intruders, the crafty birds can remain well-fed while sitting pretty in one place all winter long!

Clark’s Nutcracker – The Ultimate Master of Bird Memory?

We started our list with a member of the crow family, so let’s end with one, too. While jays are probably the most famous of all birds for their caching behavior, their cousin the nutcrackers may well be the masters of it.

In late summer and early fall, Clark’s nutcrackers wind their raucous way through Pinyon pine and whitebark pine forests in search of the large, nutritious pine kernels that the trees provide. But instead of feasting on them all at once, the birds store tens of thousands of seeds to eat later.

Scientists studying the nutcrackers estimate that individual birds may bury more than 30,000 seeds in a season, remembering their location up to 9 months later!

A feat of memory on this scale has rarely been documented elsewhere in the animal kingdom, and would likely also outdo most human brains! If you returned to the woods in May, would you be able to remember the location of the 30,000 seeds you buried in the woods the previous August? I doubt many of us could!