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Avian psychology, more commonly known as bird psychology is the study of bird’s mind, behaviour and feelings especially our garden variety of bird.

Avian and or bird psychology is also known has avian cognition and ethology – just so you know!

Avian psychology is a term that refers to the mental processes and behaviours or cognitive functions of birds.

This study includes memory, learning, and problem solving including believe it or not communication, emotions and their social behaviour and all this takes place in your garden!

Avian cognition more commonly focuses on how birds perceive things, their actual perception and process and use that information. An example of this is very clever crows using tools or implements to access food to move or open things or gain access.

Additionally, how parrots understand words or pigeons that can recognise faces and they can find water in scorching temperatures. All birds have an internal map of their territorial surrounds to meet their needs.

Ethology is a wider field studying animal behaviour in their natural habitat or natural conditions. Avian bird behaviour is a specific branch of ethology, especially the studying of mating rituals, parenting activities and demonstration and flock dynamics as it’s called along with territoriality.

When us humans think of intelligence and emotional feelings in animals we often jump to the ones, we are sure are feeling things such as primates’ apes’ gorillas and especially dolphins including canines.

Actually, there is a quieter, a more delicate genius fluttering above us and they are birds and they’ve all got brains the size of nuts or walnuts and much smaller and these birds often demonstrate behaviours that challenge and rival larger brained animals.

Birds are an interesting and fascinating blend of emotion, feelings, cognition, social intelligence and in particular instinctual behaviour all mixed together. An ideal example of this is to watch a crow solve a puzzle or seeing a parrot mimic not just speech but actual context where you can view the sharp mind behind their very sharp beak.

Certain birds are considered to be very clever more so than other birds such as crows, especially raven’s, parrots and pigeons are capable of tool use such as crows using twigs to fish for insects, counting and numerical cognition, understanding cause and effect and planning for the future mimicking human speech and applying actual context.

These things are not basic instinct as you may argue this is actual solid problem-solving memory and even culture in some species.

The common question is this: Do birds really have emotions; do they have feelings which you could call emotions?

Science is still catching up with what many bird lovers and bird owners including observers have long believed that birds actually feel emotions.

It has been observed by experts that geese and cockatoos suffer grief when morning lost mates, joy singing, dancing and playing. Empathy, consoling behavers in covids and parrots, jealousy very common in parrots when their human gives attention to elsewhere and that does include another parrot, it can’t be to anything else.

Bird emotions may not actually look like ours but they are very real in their own way. Pleasure like chemicals in birds assist them with bonding and finding to produce offspring.

It’s also been noted especially by owners that parrots can exhibit signs of depression when neglected and enter into self-harming or destructive behaviours such as self-plucking or withdrawal which is incredibly distressing and sad to watch because you know that bird is suffering from disturbance of their mind.

Flock dynamics

Many bird species are very social and that includes complex communication skills and hierarchy systems.

Parrots and corvids form tight knit groups with dynamic relationships.

Ravens engage in deception, forming alliances and believe it or not hold grudges.

Pigeons can actually recognise human individual faces and they can also remember who was friendly and who wasn’t hence they are often seen in crowds of pigeons around someone on a park bench feeding them bread.

Pigeons know a good human heart; they also know how to manipulate you into giving more bread!

Birds communicate through songs, calls, and body language and they even have dance rituals.

Social intelligence in birds is constantly changing and adapting to their social environment for each of their own safety.

Bird play

Birds have often been observed playing games with each other’s dancing to rhythms especially parrots and creating art.

Birds can also solve puzzles for fun, not just for food.

Creativity in birds indicates that they aren’t just reaching to the world they’re actually interacting and engaging with it often exploring, expressing and even entertaining themselves.

Bird song

Bird songs aren’t just about background music for your morning coffee. It’s a complex learned behaviour more in line to language than we often thought. Songbirds must learn their songs much like children learn speech.

Parrots don’t just mimic others they often use human words in the right context especially when trained with positive reinforcements.

And believe it or not bird calls can differ by region called creating bird dialects!

Birds alter their course to soothe social situations, their comfort, alert mating or give off alarms and warnings.

Psychologists have also found that some species of birds even show signs of syntax which is the structuring calls in specific order to convey different meanings.

Attachment is real and intense in birds, sometimes to the point of heartbreak. Hand reared parrots often bond so deeply with humans that they can suffer severe stress and trauma if separated.

Often pigeons will find a mate, male and female and they will stay together loyal with each other for the rest of their lives and take turns sitting on the nests and rearing the young both male and female will be involved in this process and when one of these pigeons dies often the other one lives out their life on their own or crawls away and dies shortly after some say of a broken heart.

Avian memory and learning

Pigeons have been taught to distinguish Monet and Picasso.

Crows can remember the faces of human’s years after.

Chickadees hide and store food in hundreds of spots and remember each location in fine detail.

Birds including pigeons around their territory where they live know multiple places or sources of water. They have an internal map in their mind and they know that there is a garden pond 10 houses away and another 17 houses away in another direction. They also know where they can find water in gutters that haven’t emptied or little streams or brooks as it’s all part of their survival.

Birds learn through observation, social learning, trial and error, imitation and conditioning.

Birds also exhibit episodic like memory which is the remembering what just happened where and when.

This kind of memory is considered a very high cognitive function which was once thought exclusive to humans and a few mammals.

Author’s Note:

There lies the ignorance of the human, with much for us to still go on to learn.

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