Scientists challenging the problem-solving capacities of rare birds of prey on the Falkland Islands have found them astonishingly quick to learn when food is on offer – and remember those skills a year later. The finding supports Darwin’s assessment of the birds’ remarkable intelligence when he visited during the voyage of the Beagle, and also shows the sorts of intelligence we most admire are more widespread among birds than has previously been acknowledged.
Humans have long been reluctant to acknowledge intelligence in animals – and when we did, it came most easily with our nearest relatives, the great apes, followed by other mammals. More recently, however, tool use and problem-solving in birds like crows and parrots have become too obvious to deny. Falcons have generally not been included on that list, despite the extent to which we have formed symbiotic relationships with them, but that might be about to change.
Striated caracaras (Phalcoboenus australis) are members of the Falconidae family that live in Tierra del Fuego and the Falkland Islands. These cold islands lack abundant sources of food, and the caracaras will eat whatever is going, including penguins (and their eggs) and seal pups. They work collectively to attack larger prey, and perhaps it is this that has developed their brain power.
Darwin had mixed feelings about the caracaras, writing about them more than any other bird he encountered on the long voyage, but not always positively. One even stole a compass from the ship, while a hat was carried far before being abandoned and recovered. Although critical of their character, Darwin did not miss the caracaras’ intelligence and pondered why so capable a bird would live somewhere so unappealing.
Noting that the caracaras behave more like ravens than other falcons, Katie Harrington of the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna and colleagues tested 15 wild birds by setting out a puzzle box with food available to those who could solve one of eight rotating challenges. “They were ace! We were really blown away by how quickly they set to the tasks and solved them. This is unlike anything we’ve seen before in wild birds of prey,” Harrington said in a statement accompanying a paper on the challenge last year.
Now, Harrington and co-authors have followed up with evidence that, like the famous saying about elephants, the caracaras don’t forget, maintaining skills they have not had an opportunity to use for a while.
Certainly, the team did not lack willing participants, noting that when they set the boxes down on a wind-blasted Falklands hillside the birds ran at full speed to investigate.
“Striated caracaras have to be really exploratory, constantly examining new situations in their environment to find out what works for them. Is this food? What can I do with this? It takes a certain creative bravery to make life work on the Falklands,” Harrington said of the original experiments.
Each bird was only given one chance a day to solve the puzzles. “They’d energetically kick and pull at different functional parts the same way we would grab something to learn how it works. They’d also move to look at the box from different angles, crouching down to look from below or jumping on top to look from above,” Harrington continued. “And the more they explored the puzzles, the better they got at them.”
The tests were the same ones Goffin’s cockatoos passed with flying colors in 2021, and the team found the caracaras were slower, but more reliably got there in the end. “There were some tasks the caracaras were even better at, most likely due to differences in their ecology,” said senior author Megan Lambert.
By comparing how well different birds perform at tasks like these, the authors hope to identify the circumstances in which these problem-solving skills develop. This in turn could prove informative on humanity’s rise in this department.
In the new paper, the researchers report on what happened when they brought the puzzle box back a little over a year later. The Falklands lack home-grown puzzle boxes, and the birds had not had a chance to maintain their skills – yet the five tested members of the original crew found the challenge like riding a bike.
A striated caracara tackling one of the boxes puzzles.
Image Credit: Oly Dempster
As soon as the box was returned, the falcons replicated the techniques that had won them success the year before. In 69 percent of cases, they immediately tried the specific approach suited to a particular puzzle most recently used in the prior year. Other times they tried a solution suited to a different puzzle, before getting the moves right. Participating birds got to the prize four times faster than they had when first encountering the box the year before, with most even beating their last effort from the previous year.
Those who had learned to solve the puzzles the year before were almost twice as fast as a control group who had not solved the puzzles previously.
The control caracaras completed the task much more quickly than those on their first test the year before. However, they had an advantage in that, although the controls had not solved these specific tasks previously, they were familiar with the box and what might be called its rules.
Harrington told IFLScience that the team took steps to prevent the birds from learning from each other by distracting them with another food source and not allowing onlookers within 3 meters (10 feet).
“However, given that these birds have a long, very social youth, it’s likely that they do learn socially in some contexts. That’s one of our next steps, to study when, what, and how they might learn from each other, and to what degree they rely on personal versus social information when faced with new challenges,” she told IFLScience.
“Our results suggest long-term memory may be important for non-migratory opportunistic generalists, particularly in remote island environments with seasonally available resources,” the authors write in the new paper.
The original research is published open access in Current Biology while the recent update is published in the same journal.
