Bird Minds: Cognition and Behaviour of Australian Native Birds

Abstract

The idea for this book had its beginning some 15 years ago when our galah, at the age of 75, learned new words. If ever there waS evidence of a plastic brain, he showed it convincingly but there was relatively little to which it could be related in Australian species at the time. There were few papers that discussed the cognitive ability of Australian cockatoos, or other birds for that matter. Of course, there had been important ideas and observations about the cognitive and emotional dimensions in a long and weighty history of avian behaviour as the writings by Charles Darwin (1890, 1965, 1981), then Niko Tinbergen (1953), W. H. Thorpe (1956), Konrad Lorenz (1966) ;and others attest. From the late 1970s onwards, it was once again raised as a possibility that some birds and other animals may have plastic brains (Kroodsma and Miller 1996), may have minds of their own and are capable of actions beyond those that are 'pre-programmed'; adaptive or merely copied from others (Griffin 1984, 1992; Roitblat 1987; Ristau 1991; Rogers 1997; Basil et al. 1996; Balda et al. 1998).