Scientists are Surprised by the Intelligence Manifested in Birds
Carlio Melo, a brain researcher in Rockefeller University's animal behavior laboratory, says: ". . . in the beginning of the century up to the 30th and 40th, people believed that the brain of birds were very simple and they were considered primitive. And that created a lot of problems, a lot of prejudice actually. It's funny to think about this in science, but it does happen. … Birds are very, very intelligent in many ways… That means many birds, particularly those birds that have vocal learning such as song birds, parrots and hummingbirds, they have a very high brain to body ratio… That means these are very, very smart animals." *http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/s162563.htm
The Surprising Memory of Birds
Their skills in imitating sound are directly related to birds' ability to recall sounds they have heard. According to the research team at the Free University in Berlin, when conducting research into how a bird imitates sound, the following points should be addressed:
Vocal imitation which is so common in human beings is quite rare in nonhuman organisms. Until now, it has been documented only for a few families of birds (e. g. oscine birds and parrots) and some mammals (e. g. marine mammals and bats). As an inquiry into this accomplishment we study the properties of memory mechanisms that allow individuals to first acquire, then memorize and finally vocally imitate a set of auditorily experienced signal patterns. Our biological model is the Common Nightingale (Luscinia megarhynchos). Males of this species are able to auditorily learn and accurately reproduce more than 200 different types of songs. Thus, a central aim of our study is to uncover how these birds successfully cope with complex learning tasks, and how they effectively retrieve their memory-stored data later in life…18
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Birds' have memories of surprisingly high capacity. Not only do they recall the exact location of where they spend their summers and winters,
but also the precise location of various foodstuffs they have stored for use in the winter and of plants whose nectar they have drunk. In fact, some birds have longer-term memories than humans. In order to survive cold winter days of heavy snow, some bird species bury thousands of seeds in autumn and remember all of those different places when winter comes, months later. 19
It's certainly a miracle that a bird has such a capacity for memory and learning. At the same time, this makes nonsense of evolutionists' claims that creatures evolved. Evolutionary theory cannot explain how birds are able to store in memory sounds they have heard and then use them appropriately. Evolutionary assertions cannot explain how birds have come to possess such a memory. (For detailed information, see the chapter headed "Talking Birds Invalidate Evolutionary Claims").
It's not possible for a bird to set up a system for storing what it has learned in its tiny brain. It's similarly impossible for a special structure to form in a bird's brain by chance. Birds' ability to recall sounds and information is just one of the many talents God has granted to these creatures.
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 Humans' characteristic ability to imitate sounds is rarely found in animals, and only a very small number of animals are known to have this feature: three groups of birds, parrots (psittaciformes), songbirds (oscine passeriformes) and hummingbirds (trochiliformes), and among the mammals, bats, whales and dolphins (cetaceans)... All other species are known to produce only their inborn, instinctive sounds |
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