An inquisitive Clark’s Nutcracker at Valles Caldera National Preserve. Photo by the author.

Beyond Bird Brains: Caring for the Intelligent Life All Around Us

By Jay Cooney

As my father and I trudged up a snowy trail in Valles Caldera National Preserve, hoping to get a better view of an elk herd the next ridge over, a gray-and-black bird acknowledged our presence with a squawk. This Clark’s Nutcracker seemed to observe us with an inquisitive gaze, an air of intelligence underscored by this species’ reputation for remarkable spatial memory. Clark’s Nutcrackers cache thousands of pine seeds to endure harsh Rocky Mountain winters. Laboratory and field studies demonstrate that these birds can store upwards of 30,000 seeds across 5,000 different locations, then relocate 90% of their caches several months later. Nutcracker memory reflects just one example of avian cognition that has helped drive a major paradigm shift in our comprehension of nonhuman animal intelligence. Yet the awareness that human minds reflect only one kind of intelligence among many is hardly new.

For over 90% of our species’ history, knowledge of wild animals’ inner lives was not merely a matter of scientific curiosity, but fundamental to our everyday survival. Such attention and proximity to other species colored an understanding of reality that anthropologists refer to as animism. Animist cultures understand the world as full of beings, only some of whom are human, such that human existence is predicated on reciprocal relationships with the community of life. This relationality plays out most dramatically in examples of interspecies collaboration, such as communication between Hadza people and the honeyguide birds who lead them to sought-after beehives. As Brooke Williams discusses in Encountering Dragonfly, such “radical intimacy” had to be severed for colonial projects to take hold in treating the world as a storehouse of resources ready-made for exploitation. We are now reckoning with the detriments this imposed isolation from wild nature inflicts on our own minds.

Even in urban environments, where our sense of ecological place is often obscured by concrete and steel, we are hard-wired to seek connection with wild species. The biophilia hypothesis, as articulated by biologist E.O. Wilson, posits that humans are innately drawn towards affiliation with other life. Growing research on biophilia’s link to our health demonstrates that exposure to birdsong can help alleviate anxiety, reduce associated cortisol levels, promote positive emotions, and improve attention and focus. Such findings have inspired movements to design ‘biophilic cities’ that are more habitable for birds and other wildlife, recognizing that the company of other beings is critical to our wellbeing.

As Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in Braiding Sweetgrass, various Indigenous nations have for millennia looked to other species for older insights. From an animistic perspective, birdsong is more than a natural backdrop but reflects sources of intelligence from which we can learn how to belong in relation to life. Brooke Williams similarly asserts that the path forward for our survival in a changing world is already inscribed in our evolutionary history among other beings. By attending to the many intelligences all around us, we might come home to our own responsibilities of reciprocity with the community of life.