A ‘birdbrain’ is a scatterbrained person, someone who’s all over the place. But the monk vultures in this film are anything but crazy or stupid. They simply find themselves in a precarious situation. They are threatened with extinction.
Zoos are trying to do something about this through breeding programmes. But in captivity, you cannot learn what you learn in the wild, and you have to learn to survive. Worse still, research shows that animals in captivity become less intelligent, which means that endangered species run the risk of developing a ‘threatened brain’. Biologist and psychologist
Frederick Verbruggen of Ghent University (EcoBird) is trying to tackle this in two ways.
On the one hand, he is trying to map out how bearded vultures, as well as other bird species such as gulls, songbirds, chickens, parakeets and quails, perceive the world, what they pay attention to, how they learn and remember things, and how they make decisions and choices based on this – a field of research known as cognitive science.
On the other hand, he is trying to devise ‘exercises’ with which birds in captivity, and bearded vultures in particular, can be better trained for life in the wild once they are released
