Starlings are medium-sized songbirds that belong to the Sturnidae family. They are native to temperate areas of Europe, Asia, and North America. Starlings are known for their large flocks, intricate vocalizations, and ability to mimic sounds. But are they intelligent birds? Let’s take a closer look at the brainpower and behaviors of the starling to find out.
Starling Intelligence Compared to Other Birds
When it comes to avian intelligence, not all birds are created equal. Corvids such as crows and ravens top the list, with parrots coming in second. Where do starlings rank? Research shows that starlings demonstrate cognitive abilities above average for their size and family classification. However, their intelligence lags behind corvids and parrots who have much larger brains relative to their body size.
Studies comparing starlings to other bird species have found that:
- Starlings perform better on tests of basic problem solving abilities, like opening boxes to retrieve food, compared to pigeons. However, starlings are outperformed by larger corvid species like jays.
- Starlings can memorize the location of hidden food up to 12 days later. This beats pigeons but falls short of corvids that remember for weeks or months.
- When it comes to vocal mimicry, starlings excel. They can replicate much longer sounds and human speech compared to most birds besides parrots.
So in the bird kingdom, starlings are moderately intelligent – not Einstein-level geniuses but far from birdbrained!
Evidence of Starling Intelligence
Researchers have uncovered many examples of complex behaviors and advanced cognitive abilities in starlings that point to their intelligence:
Tool use
Starlings occasionally use tools to achieve goals. Cases have been documented of starlings using small sticks or twigs to probe into holes to retrieve larvae. They were even able to modify the stick’s length if it was too long or short to fit inside the cavity.
Problem solving
Starlings can solve fairly challenging problems to get food. When presented with a puzzle box containing a treat, starlings are able to figure out multiple steps to open the box, like pulling levers, sliding doors, and flipping lids in the right sequence.
Innovative foraging
Starlings occasionally come up with creative solutions to forage for food. Some starlings have been observed dropping hard-shelled mollusks from heights onto rocks to crack open the shells. Others use bread crumbs or other objects to bait fish close to the water’s surface to catch them.
Observational learning
Starlings are able to observe and learn new behaviors from each other. When one starling figures out a novel foraging technique, others are able to pick it up by watching. Starling flocks have been documented rapidly acquiring new behaviors like roof-top nesting or chimney roosting in this way.
Memory
Starlings have excellent memories – they are able to memorize over 20 different hiding spots for food and recall them even after 12 days. Their spatial memory and mapping abilities help them return to productive foraging sites year after year.
Communication
Starling vocalizations are complex and elaborate. They include a mix of melodious warbles, whistles, and clicks. Regional starling groups develop their own dialects of songs. And starlings are excellent vocal mimics – they can imitate a wide variety of sounds from other birds, animals, machinery, and even human speech.
The ability to develop regional song variations and accurately mimic novel sounds indicates sophisticated vocal learning abilities in starlings.
Starling Brains
The brains of starlings show features that support complex cognition and intelligence:
- Large relative brain size – the brain accounts for 2-2.5% of starlings’ body mass, larger than average for songbirds of their size.
- Advanced neural connectivity – starlings have more neuronal connections between brain areas involved in learning, memory and goal-directed behaviors compared to chicken brains.
- Specializations for vocal learning – starlings have distinct song control nuclei in their brains that allow them to hear and memorize sounds.
- High forebrain development – the basal ganglia and other forebrain areas involved in cognition are enlarged and well-developed in starlings.
These neural adaptations provide starlings with enhanced processing power for behaviors like innovative foraging, flexible communication, and social interactions that require intelligence.
Starling Intelligence Experiments
Controlled experiments with starlings have revealed more about the scope of their mental capacities. Some notable examples include:
Sequence learning
Starlings were taught to peck colored buttons on a panel in a set sequence, up to 7 buttons long. Starlings learned these sequences as quickly as primates and could recall them after a year, demonstrating excellent long-term memory.
Categorization
When shown images of cats, cars, chairs, etc. starlings could learn to peck one button for “natural” categories like cats and another for “man-made” categories like cars and chairs. This shows an ability to classify objects conceptually.
Inferential reasoning
Starlings were able to learn abstract rules about how sets of visual objects relate to each other and apply them to new examples. This required advanced reasoning abilities.
These studies reveal how flexible and quick-learning starling brains are. Under controlled conditions, they solve problems, categorize concepts, and make inferences almost as capably as species considered highly intelligent like chimps and humans.
Limits on Starling Intelligence
While starlings are relatively smart for a songbird, there are limits on their mental capabilities especially compared to larger-brained birds. Areas where starlings fall short include:
- Abstract reasoning – starlings struggled with learning same/different discriminations that pigeons could master, indicating poorer abstraction ability.
- Insight – starlings did not demonstrate “Aha!” moments of sudden insight in problem-solving like corvids. They succeeded more through trial-and-error.
- Causal understanding – starlings had difficulty figuring out causal relationships between events, unlike ravens that made inferences about cause-and-effect.
- Object manipulation – starlings lack the dexterous object manipulation skills of parrots and corvids that enable complex tool use.
So while innovative and quick learners, starlings lack deeper comprehension of concepts, spontaneous insight, and physical object manipulation skills compared to some other brainy birds. Their intelligence appears more tied to memorization, mimicry and responding to conditioning.
Why Are Starlings Intelligent?
Scientists theorize that certain ecological and social factors have driven the evolution of enhanced intelligence in starlings and other songbirds:
Foraging challenges
Starlings occupy challenging foraging niches across many habitats from forests to grasslands to cities. Finding and extracting food in these environments may have favored cognitive traits like innovative problem-solving and flexible learning in starlings.
Flock living
Navigating large social groups with changing dynamics requires brainpower. Starlings may have developed abilities for observational learning, communication, and social cognition to thrive in complex flocks of thousands of birds.
Urban environments
Some research suggests starlings living in cities show heightened problem-solving capabilities and larger brains than rural starlings. Urban challenges like avoiding traffic, raiding trash cans, and nesting on buildings may stimulate cognitive development.
In short, the variable and socially complex ecology of starlings appears to have led to enhanced intelligence and adaptability – though they still can’t match larger-brained avian groups.
Conclusion: Moderately Intelligent Birds
Research to date indicates that starlings demonstrate above-average intelligence compared to related songbird species. They show advanced memory skills, vocal mimicry, innovative foraging, and problem-solving that require cognitive flexibility and learning. However, starlings lack the deeper abstract reasoning and causal insights of corvid species with larger brains. While innovative and quick studies, starlings are best classified as a moderately intelligent bird species.
Some key points on starling intelligence include:
- Starlings have better basic problem-solving skills compared to pigeons and rank moderately high for their brain size
- Starlings excel at mimicry and can replicate novel sounds, indicating vocal learning ability
- Starlings display complex behaviors like innovative foraging, social learning, and memory over 12 days that require intelligence
- Starling brains show specializations like enhanced forebrain structures and song nuclei that support cognition
- Experiments reveal starlings can categorize concepts, make inferences and learn sequences as well as primates
- However, starlings lag behind corvids and parrots in areas like causal reasoning, insight, and object manipulation
In the avian world, starlings fly somewhere in the middle – more brainy than a pigeon but not quite as clever as a crow. Their mix of vocal talents, flexibility, memory, and social savvy earns them a respectable level of intelligence for a bird.
