Can humans ever hope to understand what birds are thinking?
Can humans ever hope to understand what birds are thinking?
October 24, 2026
Many years ago, when I was an Assistant Professor at Washington University in St. Louis, I was in a relatively small department which nevertheless had some of the most famous biologists in the world including Viktor Hamburger, a future National Medal of Science winner, and Rita Levy-Montalcini who went on to win a Nobel Prize. They and I and a few other members of the department often ate our bag lunches together in a small conference room where the discussion was always about current ideas in biology. One such idea, held apparently exclusively by me in this group, was that the mammals and birds I was working with seemed to have a lot of human-like behavior: much of the time it didn’t seem too hard to imagine what they were thinking and what they might do next. These colleagues, mostly developmental biologists working with tissues rather than whole animals, considered this type of thinking anthropomorphizing and decidedly “unscientific”. Another colleague closer to my age, Michael W. Fox, felt much the same way I did. He was a veterinarian with Ph.D. in medicine studying canid behavior, hand-raising wolves, foxes, and coyote-dog hybrids in the lab next to mine and ultimately writing more than 40 books on animal behavior including “Understanding Your Dog” (1992).
In 1975, just as I left Washington U, Edward O. Wilson, at Harvard, wrote ‘Sociobiology’ about animal societies (especially of insects but also of elephants) which created a tremendous controversy about whether human social behavior is simply the product of our evolved biology, something I had thought all along. I have the distinct feeling that since then professional biological thinking has moved quite far in our direction—it certainly has for the general public who now highly value animal rights but didn’t much think about them then. This still doesn’t answer the question about what birds are thinking but it goes some way toward explaining why they behave the way they do—all of us vertebrates are wired in similar ways. Invertebrates certainly are not, but even with comparatively tiny genomes they exhibit complex social behaviors. More about bird brains later.