A coffee with… Louis Lefebvre | The elegance of the hummingbird

Today, our columnist meets the ethologist Louis Lefebvre

Professor Louis Lefebvre traveled extensively for birds. This was not to surprise the furtive black-tie Alapi in the Suriname jungle. Nor to dialogue with the half-mourning batara on the banks of the Orinoco.

The flamboyant colors, the rarity, the acrobatics of the birds, in short, everything that thrills the average ornithologist leaves the eminent biologist vaguely bored.

“My idea of ​​a Sunday morning is not to take my backpack at 5 a.m. to go to the forest. First of all, it’s way too early. And if you ask me: “What is this bird?”, in general, I don’t know. OK, if it’s upside down on the tree trunk, it’s a nuthatch, otherwise it’s a titmouse, but that’s it. »

He had a lot of fun with the pigeons in the Milton-Parc neighborhood, on the other hand. And for him, there is more poetry in the song of a simple starling in the middle of an alley than in the dazzling adornment of an indigo bunting. “There is an extraordinary magic in the unexpected song of a starling in the middle of the city. And when I see a gull above the houses, I feel like I’m at the seaside, it makes me dream. »

What really appeals to Professor Lefebvre is the brains of birds. And if he spent hours and weeks chasing pigeons in Montreal and doves in Barbados, it was ultimately in libraries that he learned the most about the intelligence of birds. How ? By plucking, so to speak, ornithological magazines to collect thousands of examples of strange, never seen, unexpected behavior. Because in the four corners of the world, and almost behind every bush, a “zoiseau” enthusiast points his binoculars. And he notes all sorts of astonishing behaviors, which are described in magazines under the heading “unusual”, sort of ornithological news items.

And what is unusual is often the manifestation of avian innovation. A sign of intelligence, in short.

Because yes, birds are capable of invention. Some make tools, like the New Caledonian crow, which tears pandanus leaves to dig into holes and extract larvae. Or the rook, which adds stones to a container of water to raise the level and reach floating food. The geospize, for its part, looks for twigs to rummage in the earth in search of insects. He even removes the leaves from a raspberry stem to have a better tool: the thorns on the stem scratch better and bring in more insects.

Others, like a Galapagos Island finch (vampire geospize!), a subspecies “stranded” on an island lacking the traditional food of these finches, have become blood drinkers. They inflict wounds on larger maritime birds that live in colonies, and sometimes even rush over the corpses of their fellow birds to suck the blood.

The world of birds is sometimes shocking, sorry to post this on a Sunday morning.

For a long time, the intelligence of birds has been underestimated by biologists. Scientific advances over the last 25 years teach us that they are, on the contrary, very brilliant, sometimes much more so than mammals.

So, we very rarely see them smoking a cigarette nine meters from the entrance to a public building at -25 degrees Celsius. Even the ostrich, one of the stupidest birds there is, wouldn’t wait in line for five hours to buy the new iPhone.

There is a somewhat simplistic tendency to classify species in a linear manner, from insect to fish to reptile to bird to mammal, with Ron DeSantis at the top.

We are wrong.

But it was only in 1996 that we rediscovered the intelligence of the New Caledonian crow, he says. “In 2000, we realized that some birds have even more neurons in their small brains than some primates. We’re just beginning to uncover their brains. »

Louis Lefebvre, who has just published in completely accessible language the fruit of 40 years of research^⁠1is part of this generation of ethologists who have, so to speak, rehabilitated the reputation of buzzards, single, double or triple, linnets and other chickens.

That said, as with fish and humans, generalizations should not be made. Thus, the turkey does not particularly stand out for its intellectual abilities. There is a general rule that the smaller the head in relation to the body, the less intelligent the bird. The parrot has a large head and an average body: it is highly intelligent. The sparrow has a small head, but a small body: it ranks well. The ostrich is radically the opposite. Professor Lefebvre almost caused riots in Australia when he told local journalists that the stupidest bird in the world was probably the emu – the country’s emblematic bird.

Louis Lefebvre arrived at birds through psychology. “Nothing really excited me in psychology. It seemed to me that concepts and fashions changed every two months. At some point, everyone talks about resilience. Two years later, no one talks about it anymore…”

He then discovered the work of Conrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen, founders of ethology – and co-Nobel in physiology. “The time scale that causes animal behavior to change, we’re talking about thousands of years. It felt like something more constant. »

Lefebvre did a postdoctoral fellowship at Oxford with Richard Dawkins, whose work followed that of Lorenz and company. He was conscripted into studying the grooming of crickets, in order to determine whether these insects respect a “grammar” in their behavior. The answer (coming after hours of fun) is yes.

He then made a career at McGill University, studying innovations in birds.

“We don’t really know where intelligence happens,” says the researcher. But “flexibility,” or innovativeness, and “innovation” are reliable measures. An intelligent bird invents survival techniques. And it adapts to changing environments – like the vampire finch.

By adding up cases of innovation found in journals around the world, he and his team were able to create a list of the most intelligent birds, based on observations made in nature. The system is much more rigorous than the summary I give here, and it has become popular, including for studying primates.

Among species that “innovate,” it’s a minority that finds things. When these species are social, innovation spreads faster than the fashion for under-roasting coffee among Mile End mammals in the 2010s. A “cumulative culture” is created, knowledge spreads.

Some intelligent birds that steal sugar packets from restaurants keep their find to themselves by hiding to open them.

Excessive recklessness can be dangerous, skateboard like in a bird’s life. “If you’re always exploring, you’re going to get diseases. Innovators are going to have pathogens. »

Also, intelligence is not everything. The most intelligent birds, with the largest brains (hornbill, parrot), develop more slowly. “If it takes you five years instead of five months to have descendants, your population could crash. »

The researcher doesn’t use the phrase “too smart for its own good,” but he cites the success of many species at the carpet level when it comes to neurons that nevertheless have spectacular demographic success. The mourning dove shouldn’t be: it’s the most common bird in North America. But even sweeter than that, you lay numbered eggs for the Federation.

The temptation is strong, as you see, to draw parallels between human intelligence and that of birds. The researcher refuses any such attempt.

“There are a lot of similarities between the intelligent and non-intelligent behaviors of birds and humans,” he concedes. But trying to draw laws about life in society from animal behavior is not intelligent. Those who do so generally pursue political objectives without the slightest rigor, drawing on science to give a veneer of credibility to their theses.

“My advantage is that I don’t get emails from the chickens saying, ‘Why do you say I’m stupider?’ »

— Maybe that proves they’re stupid?

— I also don’t get emails from crows on social media saying: “We’re killing all the chickens, they’re an inferior breed.” »

The researcher, who is also the author of four novels, delves into fiction to explore all that is irrational and complex in human relationships and behavior.

“Darwin clearly showed that our intelligence is the product of evolution. We all agree, at least the scientists: we were not created in the image of God, but evolution has led this descendant of the great apes to have certain mental capacities that other animals do not. don’t have. But once we said that, we didn’t settle everything. »

He hopes that our “intelligence” will allow us not to destroy the habitat in which it is just beginning to deploy.

Because in 5 million years, if we have to bet on the survival of humans and crows, we are not very sure of the answer.

1. Linnet heads? Innovation and intelligence in birdsBoreal.