If you heard that there were distant islands filled with hyperintelligent birds, you would be forgiven for assuming that they must be parrots or crows, the superstars of the intelligent bird world. But travel to the Falkland Islands near the Argentine coast and you won’t find parrots or crows but strangely intelligent hawks called striated caracaras.
“I had a feeling there was something special about these birds,” said Katie Harrington, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna.
By adapting a series of tests originally designed to assess cockatoo cognition, Ms. Harrington discovered this caracaras can solve problems as well as parrots. The findings were published Monday in the journal Current Biology.
Mrs. Harrington leads the Johnny Rook Project, an effort to study Falkland falcons that took their name from the birds’ local nickname. To compare caracaras with other intelligent birds, he adapted eight tasks from a previous experiment studied innovative solutions to problems in Goffin’s Cockatoos.
Of the 15 Johnny towers tested by Ms. Harrington, all solved at least one puzzle, and 10 of them solved all eight, without any prior training.
“These caracaras actually solved tasks that some of the tool-using parrots had failed to solve,” Ms. Harrington said.
Some animals are understandably nervous around scientists and their strange equipment, which can make it difficult to test their intelligence. With caracaras, Ms. Harrington had the opposite problem. “I literally had to run on defense,” she said, keeping curious birds away while another was tested with a caracara-defying plexiglass puzzle box to pull, push, slide, hit or do anything else they needed to access tasty pieces of meat.
Considering their skill in this experiment and their general boldness, striated caracaras represent a promising new model species for studying avian cognition. “They are absolutely worth studying,” said Rachael Miller, a comparative psychologist at Anglia Ruskin University in England who was not involved in the research.
Not many scientists have studied the brain abilities of hawks, which are closely related to parrots and crows, the most famous feathered geniuses. Ms Harrington attributes this to their bird of prey label, which implies a simple lifestyle of “perch, hunt, sleep, repeat”. But those who spend time with caracaras soon learn that they have more than just meat on their minds.
“Falconers share these stories about how striped caracaras aren’t like the other birds they’re trying to train,” he said. “You need to give striped caracara dogs toys to play with.”
Dr. Miller agrees that the bird world overemphasizes some species: She found that recent studies on bird behavior and cognition have focused on just about 1% of the 10,000 known bird species. “I fully support research that is expanding to other groups of birds beyond corvids and parrots,” Dr. Miller said.
Ms Harrington suspects that caracaras developed their cunning to cope with the harsh living conditions of the Falkland Islands. In the summer months caracaras may feed on colonies of seabirds. But when these birds migrate in winter, the hawks are “kind of out of luck,” Ms. Harrington said. Curiosity and ingenuity could help a hungry caracara find a meal in lean times.
Their bold ways have landed the Hawks in trouble with Falkland sheep farmers. “Historically they have faced persecution,” Ms. Harrington said. “There was actually a bounty on their beaks.”
These days, public perception has motivated legal protection of birds. This is important because, although their brilliance may make them appear ready to dominate the world, striped caracaras have a limited range: they are only found on the outer Falkland Islands and Tierra del Fuego, at the southern tip of South America.
Mrs. Harrington wants to continue testing their powerful brains. She hopes to analyze individual differences among the birds in how they approach the puzzle box and also to repeat the test on some birds a year after the experiment to see how strong their memories are. And considering how social caracaras are, Dr. Miller wonders if there’s a chance they could learn to solve problems by observing each other.
By studying birds, “there’s a whole other door we can open for comparative cognitive research,” Harrington said. Given their sharp talons and even sharper minds, don’t be surprised if these hawks manage to open that door themselves.