Birdbrain Is A Misnomer: New Studies Show Birds' Remarkable Cognitive Skills
Time|August 21,2017

Birdbrain Is A Misnomer: New Studies Show Birds' Remarkable Cognitive Skills

Jeffrey Kluger
Birdbrain Is A Misnomer: New Studies Show Birds' Remarkable Cognitive Skills

IT HAS BEEN A VERY BAD YEAR FOR BUD THE PARROT, but it has been even worse for his former owners Glenna and Martin Duram. Martin is dead, Glenna is in prison for his murder, and it was Bud, a witness to the crime, who tried to rat her out. Really.

In 2015, Glenna shot Martin five times in the midst of an argument in their Michigan home. A sensational crime became all the more so when Bud began repeating the words, “Shut up!” and much more tellingly, “Don’t f-cking shoot!” The “Shut up!” was in no one’s voice in particular, but the plea not to pull the trigger was unmistakably in Martin’s.

There was no limit of good reasons why Bud wasn’t put on the stand—beginning with the “raise your right hand” part. Even if it had somehow been possible to bring the bird into a courtroom and have him repeat Martin’s last words, there was no way of establishing that he didn’t simply pick them up from a television show. Still, Glenna was convicted on other evidence, Bud went off to live with a relative of the family’s, and the scientific community had one more extraordinary story about the equally extraordinary intelligence of birds.

This story is from the August 21,2017 edition of Time.

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This story is from the August 21,2017 edition of Time.

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