You clearly know little about the field if you have never talked to a bird researcher (neurobiologist, ethologist, psychologist) who would question the cavalier

You clearly know little about the field if you have never talked to a bird researcher (neurobiologist, ethologist, psychologist) who would question the cavalier application of the word 'consciousness' to more-or-less arbitrary bird behaviors. The behavior you are talking about is not 'latest' or even new. But I can point at any behavior to indicate anything, if my concepts do not have any real relationship to explaining how the behavior is produced or its evolutionary function. Which consciousness doesn't. You are hand-waving at "latest research" to solve an actually insoluble problem: of nailing down what consciousness is, and also of developing philosophical consensus around that concept. Apparently you think that a random committee vote will do the job. That is the only recent development here, and it isn't scientific. What you have is some fairly arbitrary experiments with a note attached to them saying 'consciousness!' The issue of consciousness was never about this. "Parallel evolution" implies that the feature at issue was not present in the common ancestors, and probably isn't present in all the descendants of those common ancestors. This is a deeply weird assumption for which there is NOT scientific evidence. Yet it made its way into this hokey little document, making it abundantly clear that its claims have not seen any serious kind of review. Your complaint about "conflation" is the tip of the iceberg - consciousness is such a vague concept, and so well detached from observables, that you will never see an end to such problems. In the "best" case you will choose some behavior (such as preening in a mirror) and flatly assert that it is consciousness - while you will get others to agree on the preening you won't get them to agree on the consciousness, leaving you with a pile of data concerning just plain preening.