The Incredible Intelligence of Kea

A piece about an unusually bright bird.

Unless you live in New Zealand, the word Kea doesn't mean a thing to you. It's a bird, and scores low on the popularity scale among other birds across the world. But this native of New Zealand won the Bird of the Year 2017 and is one of the most intelligent bird species in the world. 

Most impressively, their intelligence is thought to be as impressive as that of primates and human infants. A Ph.D. candidate in the online nature community who spent a great deal of time examining the intelligence of Kea narrated how surprisingly smart they are. These birds were trained to pick black tokens from the floor and hand it over to the group studying them in exchange for food. 

Like humans, some of them are socially dominant while some are shy. The socially dominant ones would rush to get food after picking up black tokens. On one such training day, one of them nudged the candidate in the back with a black token. It implies a discreet request for food to overcome fighting for attention over others or grabbing attention to enjoy preferential treatment. 

Irrespective of the implication, it clearly showed these birds are blessed with a brain that can come up with smart solutions by conducting situational analysis. 

However, some may feel the behaviour of one single Kea from an experimental group is not enough to reflect their impressive intelligence. 

But there’s this one experiment that has been making rounds online. Two transparent jars were placed in front of the Kea. Each contains black tokens, which on selecting gives a food reward, and an orange token with no reward. Researchers hid the samples they were taking from the two jars and placed two fists in front of kea after selecting one from each jar. 

The Kea studied the behaviour of experimenters and analyzed which ones were showing biases towards particular coloured tokens. They selected the one with an affinity for picking up black tokens. Also, they took account of the surroundings and examined which jar had a higher probability of having rewarding black tokens based on its transparent outward look. 

It showed Kea have adaptable and domain-specific intelligence and exhibit the capacity for probabilistic predictions and statistical analysis. They can also detect biased behaviour and predict future outcomes. Even being not thorough with research jargon, one can clearly understand after reading the experiment that the Kea are intelligent enough to predict by analyzing all the involved factors. 

Moreover, new studies show Kea can operate touchscreen laptops. Also, these alpine residents use their group mates as decoys while they rummage through the bags of mountaineers. 

Apart from being a champion in statistical predictions, Kea show emotional intelligence. Living in a group has made them perceptive of the emotions of others, and it gifts them a caring nature toward their groups. 

Besides being extremely intelligent, they are playful and quirky. Also, they have a specific call that makes other birds feel happy on hearing it. The only sad thing is that it has become threatened - nationally endangered. 

Photo Credit: Mark Dumont