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Exactly. A bird isn't "raising young" in an abstract way. It has genes that produce certain behaviour. Build nest. Sit on egg. Roll egg out of nest if you
by 7952 4y ago
Exactly. A bird isn't "raising young" in an abstract way. It has genes that produce certain behaviour. Build nest. Sit on egg. Roll egg out of nest if you get too hungry. Regurgitate food into squaking red mouth. Remove feces from nest. Taken together you get some level of success in reproduction.
And expecting a bird to be "intelligent" in this situation would imply a source of knowledge about what an egg is supposed to look like.
- hilbert42 4y agoThat makes sense, as I said above (after reading these posts) it seems to amount to how one defines intelligence. What you are referring to is survival/evolutionary intelligence which is inate/built-in and expressed though a bird's genes. What I was referring to was the cognitive intelligence (ability to learn from circumstance and experience and act upon it as covids and currawongs do over and above their inate/instinctive behavior). I should have been more perceptive and not mixed these. This begs the question that I've posed elsewhere: the cuckoo and other parasitic birds would, I'd reckon, also act out of inate gene-based expression in that they'd have to be quite selective about which species of birds they lay their eggs in (as I said, if they were to lay eggs in an osprey or eagle's nest then they'd likely be food). Any info on this?