Another study demonstrates that being a "bird brain" is not necessarily a bad thing:

"nation / world news
Birds blow whistle on linguistic theory
By Seth Borenstein
The Associated Press

Washington - Grade-school grammar students should put away their excuses. Scientists say even a bird brain can grasp one of grammar's early concepts.

Researchers trained starlings to differentiate between a regular birdsong "sentence" and one that was embedded with a warbled clause, according to research in today's issue of the journal Nature.

This "recursive grammar" is what linguists have long believed separated man from beast.

After a month of training, with food as a reward, University of California-San Diego psychology researcher Tim Gentner got the birds to recognize this grammatical structure in their own language. What they learned may shake up the field of linguistics.

While many animals can roar, sing, grunt or otherwise make noise, linguists have contended for years that the key to distinguishing language skills goes back to our elementary-school teachers and basic grammar.

Recursive grammar - inserting an explanatory clause like this one into a sentence - is something that humans can recognize, but not animals, researchers figured. Two years ago, a top research team tried to get tamarin monkeys to recognize such phrasing but failed.

After training, nine out of Gentner's 11 songbirds picked out the birdsong with inserted warbling or rattling bird phrases about 90 percent of the time.

Gentner trained the birds using three buttons hanging from the wall. When a bird pecked the button, it would play different versions of birdsongs that Gentner generated, some with inserted clauses and some without. If the song followed a certain pattern, birds were supposed to hit the button again with their beaks; if it followed a different pattern, they were supposed to do nothing. If the birds recognized the correct pattern, they were rewarded with food.

What the experiment shows is that language and animal cognition is a lot more complicated than scientists once thought and that there is no "single magic bullet" that separates man from beast, said UCSD cognitive-science professor Jeffrey Elman, who was not part of the Gentner research team."

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