New Evidence That City Birds Might Be More Intelligent Than Rural Ones

Many city dwellers have witnessed instances of seeming avian genius, from crows using traffic to crack nuts to a seagull opening bags of Doritos it had stolen from a convenience store. Now there’s evidence the urban environment itself might be making birds smarter, according to a study in Behavioral Ecology.

Researchers at Montreal’s McGill University wanted to see if there were intelligence differences between rural and urban bullfinches in the Barbados. So they assigned birds from both environments tasks measuring associative learning and problem solving. Birds from cities were good at performing tricky maneuvers like pulling and opening food jars. Country birds performed notably worse at these tasks.