IT USED TO happen every day at the London Zoo: Out came the dainty table and chairs, the china cups and saucers - afternoon tea, set out for the inhabitants of the ape enclosure to throw and smash. It was supposed to be amusing - a comic, reckless collision of beasts and high culture. But, as Frans de Waal explains in "Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?," apes are actually innovative, agile tool-users. For example - one of many examples - wild chimps in Gabon have been observed employing five different tools, in a methodical sequence, to break open beehives, pry the chambers apart, scoop out the honey and convey it to their mouths. Not surprisingly - to de Waal, at least - the apes in London quickly mastered the teacups and teapot too. They sat there civilly, having tea. "When the public tea parties began to threaten the human ego, something had to be done," de Waal writes. "The apes were retrained to spill the tea, throw food around, drink from the teapot's spout," and so on. The animals had to be taught to be as stupid as we assumed they were. But, of course, the fact that they could be taught to be stupid is only more perverse evidence of their intelligence. For centuries, our understanding of animal intelligence has been obscured in just this kind of cloud of false assumptions and human egotism. De Waal, a primatologist and ethologist who has been examining the fuzzy boundary between our species and others for 30 years, painstakingly untangles the confusion, then walks us through research revealing what a wide range of animal species are actually capable of. Tool use, cooperation, awareness of individual identity, theory of mind, planning, metacognition and perceptions of time - we now know that all these archetypically human, cognitive feats are performed by some animals as well. And not just primates: By the middle of Chapter 6, we're reading about cooperation among leopard coral trout. (The book's main weakness is that de Waal has too much evidence, from too many corners of the animal kingdom, to convince us with; eventually, it feels a little repetitive - we're not at all surprised that the bonobo knows to look in the stupid tube for the piece of food.) Frankly, it all deals a pretty fierce wallop to our sense of specialness. And it can provoke some desperate resistance. De Waal quotes one American psychologist, insistently holding the line of our humanness at our ability, even as children, to work together toward a shared goal: "It is inconceivable that you would ever see two chimpanzees carrying a log together," the psychologist says. But then, 25 apes at a Dutch zoo prop a tree trunk against the wall of their enclosure, climb out and raid the restaurant. What is true, it becomes clear, is that you'll never see animals doing such intelligent things if you smugly refuse to look for them, or - and this is de Waal's real point - if you don't know how to look. De Waal argues that we should attempt to understand a species' intelligence only within its own context, or umwelt: the animal's "self-centered subjective world, which represents only a small tranche of all available worlds." There are many different forms of intelligence; each should be valuated only relative to its environment. "It seems highly unfair to ask if a squirrel can count to 10 if counting is not really what a squirrel's life is about," de Waal writes. (A squirrel's life is about remembering where it stored its nuts; its intelligence is geospatial intelligence.) And yet, there's apparently a long history of scientists ignoring this truth. For example, they've investigated chimpanzees' ability to recognize faces by testing whether the chimps can recognize human faces, instead of faces of other chimps. (They do the former poorly and the latter quite well.) They've performed the famous mirror test - to gauge whether an animal recognizes the figure in a mirror as itself - on elephants using a too-small, human-size mirror. Such blind spots are, ultimately, a failure of empathy - a failure to imagine the experiment, or the form of intelligence it's testing for, through the animal's eyes. De Waal compares it to "throwing both fish and cats into a swimming pool" and seeing who can swim. We sometimes fall into what de Waal calls "neo-creationist" thinking: We accept evolution but assume "evolution stopped at the human head" - believing our bodies may have evolved from monkeys, but that our brains are their own miraculous and discrete inventions. But cognition must be understood as an evolutionary product, like any other biological phenomenon; it exists on a spectrum, de Waal argues, with familiar forms shading into absolutely alien-looking ones. He introduces what he calls the rule of "cognitive ripples": We tend to notice intelligence in primates because it's most conspicuous. It looks the most like our intelligence. But "after the apes break down the dam between the humans and the rest of the animal kingdom, the floodgates often open to include species after species." And that brings us to bird smarts, and the science journalist Jennifer Ackerman's lovely, celebratory survey, "The Genius of Birds." Somehow, it's hard to imagine these cognitive ripples rippling anywhere weirder than a bird. Look closely at one: how it chirps and twitches and flies. It's chastening to imagine a comprehensible intelligence operating inside a body so different from ours. And then there's the issue of scale: There are as many as 400 billion birds flitting around the planet; pondering their individual, perspicacious consciousnesses can be jaw-dropping, almost sublime. But, Ackerman writes, "One by one, the bellwether differences between birds and our closest primate relatives seem to be falling away." Ackerman writes about birds' genius for wayfinding; their memories; the neuro-scientific overlap of bird song and human language; avian architecture (a bird called the long-tailed tit builds a nest out of "roughly 6,000 pieces"); their canny, sophisticated social intelligence, their social learning and the evidence of their empathy. She goes to New Caledonia, an island between Australia and Fiji, where "free from the burden of vigilance" - against predators - a race of crows can futz and experiment with the materials around them until they've fashioned all kinds of hooklike, food-procuring tools. They're like Silicon Valley start-up founders, aimlessly tinkering and disrupting on a cushion of privilege. Like de Waal, Ackerman wants us to "appreciate the complex cognitive abilities of birds in their own right and not because they look like some aspect of our own." Scientists see innovation as a key measure of intelligence in the avian world: the sparrow that builds its nest in the tailpipe of an abandoned Toyota; the bullfinches in Barbados, which Ackerman discovers have learned to snatch the sugar packets from outdoor cafes as though snagging worms from dirt - these are small exertions of "genius," Ackerman writes, a talent for "catching on" to your surroundings and exploiting them. And for all the belittling of "bird brains," she shows them to be uniquely impressive machines within their own evolutionary contexts - unrecognizably so to science, at first, because, though they have equally high concentrations of neurons, they're quite differently designed from our primate brains. (And, Ackerman explains, that's because bird brains are dinosaur brains! Really!) Here's one scientist's Zen-like distillation: "There's the mammal way. And there's the bird way" - two distinct cognitive operating systems, honed through convergent evolution. The science gets mind-bending. If you want sentences like "Not only could the pigeons pick out a new Monet or Picasso, they could also tell other Impressionists (Renoir, for instance) from other Cubists (such as Braque)," then this is the book for you. And it's elevated by Ackerman's prose - the joy she takes in thinking and noticing. She homes in on "the taut, quick vitality that seems almost too much for their tiny bodies to contain" and describes a flock of 400 birds changing direction midflight as "almost instantaneous ripples of movement in what appears to be one living curtain of bird." Often, you feel her wonderment, faintly recognizing another, strange intelligence covertly operating in a world we presume to be ours: the one pecking at our muffin crumbs, the quick specks in the sky.

*Starred Review* As mammals, we are so unlike birds that it is difficult to fully appreciate that birds may be bright in ways that we cannot even begin to imagine. Their neural architecture developed very differently from that of mammals the needs created by flight may explain this, but as Ackerman (Ah-Choo! The Uncommon Life of Your Common Cold, 2010) makes abundantly clear, birds are brilliant in their own ways. Defining genius as the knack for knowing what you're doing, Ackerman tells the tales of several species of birds with skills or abilities that demonstrate what might be happening brainwise as birds solve the problems of getting the most from their environment. New Caledonian crows are famous for using such tools as modified sticks to get at food, giving rise to the idea of innovation being a sign of intelligence. Social species, such as chickadees and zebra finches, demonstrate the value of the group in passing along information. In understanding the significance of a mockingbird adding new songs to its repertoire, the author examines the importance of learning in birds. Male satin bowerbirds build elaborate structures used to woo females, begging the question of avian aesthetics. Ackerman's investigation into the ability of birds to map their world and the intelligence of adaptability wind up a book that shows that although bird brains may be small, birds punch well above their weight class.--Bent, Nancy Copyright 2016 Booklist

Birds receive a bum rap from humans, according to Ackerman (Ah-Choo! The Uncommon Life of Your Common Cold). We regard people of low intelligence as "birdbrains" and dismiss crazy ideas as being "for the birds." In this fascinating audiobook, Ackerman argues that current scientific research indicates that birds are far more intelligent and sophisticated creatures than previously thought. In the past, scientists believed that in order to have the light weight needed for flight, birds traded off brain mass, meaning they relied on hard-wired instinct to survive. However, the brains of birds contain as many neurons as those of larger animals. They also engage in cultivated patterns of behavior. Some birds have the capability to use tools. Females select mates best suited to ensure the survival of their offspring. Older birds teach the young ones the skills necessary for survival. Birds engage in highly developed social skills including the ability to deceive, manipulate, practice fairness, and perhaps even to grieve. Reader Margaret Storm does an excellent job presenting this work. VERDICT Perhaps one of the best audio-books of the year, this is recommended to all listeners. ["Highly recommended for all interested in natural history, behavior, and ecotravel": LJ 4/15/16 review of the Penguin hc.]-Stephen Hupp, West Virginia Univ. Parkersburg Lib. © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Popular science writer Ackerman (Ah-Choo!: The Uncommon Life of Your Common Cold) puts paid to the notion of being birdbrained with this survey of the observational and experimental evidence for impressive bird cognition. She explores birds' capacities for tool use, socialization, navigation, mimicry, discrimination, and possibly even theory of mind. Ackerman interviews specialists without overindulging in research travelogue, keeping centered on her feathered subjects rather than on the human interactions, and urges against anthropomorphizing bird behavior, correlating specific behaviors to generalized intelligence, or benchmarking the value of avian mental skills to that of humans. But her most interesting bits of trivia play to that urge: undergraduates who fail at mental simulations at which some birds succeed, bowerbirds trained to distinguish good human art from bad, Thomas Jefferson's mockingbird singing "popular songs of the day," and pigeons learning to open automatic cafeteria doors. Though Ackerman's focus is mainly ethological, she also speculates on the possible relationships between complex task completion and evolutionary fitness. This light popular science read doesn't present much new framing or insight; Ackerman seeks out current research to discover a few surprises, such as a possible role for olfactory cues in navigation, but doesn't point to or create any big conceptual shifts. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Science writer Ackerman (Ah-Choo!: The Uncommon Life of Your Common Cold, 2010, etc.) looks at the new science surrounding avian intelligence. The takeaway: calling someone a birdbrain is a compliment. And in any event, as Ackerman observes early on, "intelligence is a slippery concept, even in our own species, tricky to define and tricky to measure." Is a bird that uses a rock to break open a clamshell the mental equivalent of a tool-using primate? Perhaps that's the wrong question, for birds are so unlike humans that "it's difficult for us to fully appreciate their mental capabilities," given that they're really just small, feathered dinosaurs who inhabit a wholly different world from our once-arboreal and now terrestrial one. Crows and other corvids have gotten all the good publicity related to bird intelligence in recent years, but Ackerman, who does allow that some birds are brighter than others, points favorably to the much-despised pigeon as an animal that "can remember hundreds of different objects for long periods of time, discriminate between different painting styles, and figure out where it's going, even when displaced from familiar territory by hundreds of miles." Not bad for a critter best known for bespattering statues in public parks. Ackerman travels far afield to places such as Barbados and New Caledonia to study such matters as memory, communication, and decision-making, the last largely based on visual cuesthough, as she notes, birds also draw ably on other senses, including smell, which in turn opens up insight onto "a weird evolutionary paradox that scientists have puzzled over for more than a decade"a matter of the geometry of, yes, the bird brain. Ackerman writes with a light but assured touch, her prose rich in fact but economical in delivering it. Fans of birds in all their diversity will want to read this one. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.