Many a young water-bird, such as a coot, swims right away when it is
tumbled into water for the first time. So chicks peck without any
learning or teaching, very young ducklings catch small moths that flit
by, and young plovers lie low when the danger-signal sounds. But birds
seem strangely limited as regards many of these instinctive
capacities--limited when compared with the "little-brained" ants and
bees, which have from the first such a rich repertory of ready-made
cleverness. The limitation in birds is of great interest, for it means
that intelligence is coming to its own and is going to take up the
reins at many corners of the daily round. Professor Lloyd Morgan
observed that his chickens incubated in the laboratory had no
instinctive awareness of the significance of their mother's cluck when
she was brought outside the door. Although thirsty and willing to drink
from a moistened finger-tip, they did not instinctively recognize water,
even when they walked through a saucerful. Only when they happened to
peck their toes as they stood in the water did they appreciate water as
the stuff they wanted, and raise their bills up to the sky. Once or
twice they actually stuffed their crops with "worms" of red worsted!
Instinctive aptitudes, then, the young birds have, but these are more
limited than in ants, bees, and wasps; and the reason is to be found in
the fact that the brain is now evolving on the tack of what Sir Ray
Lankester has called "educability." Young birds _learn_ with prodigious
rapidity; the emancipation of the mind from the tyranny of hereditary
obligations has begun. Young birds make mistakes, like the red worsted
mistake, but they do not make the same mistakes often. They are able to
profit by experience in a very rapid way. We do not mean that creatures
of the little-brain type, like ants, bees, and wasps, are unable to
profit by experience or are without intelligence. There are no such
hard-and-fast lines. We mean that in the ordinary life of insects the
enregistered instinctive capacities are on the whole sufficient for the
occasion, and that intelligent educability is very slightly developed.
Nor do we mean that birds are quite emancipated from the tyranny of
engrained instinctive obligations, and can always "ring up" intelligence
in a way that is impossible for the stereotyped bee. The sight of a
pigeon brooding on an empty nest, while her two eggs lie disregarded
only a couple of inches away, is enough to show that along certain lines
birds may find it impossible to get free from the trammels of instinct.
The peculiar interest of birds is that they have many instincts and yet
a notable power of learning intelligently.