This is scientific American 60 second science. I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

The old expression bird brain referring to a small or inadequate brain size, it's not all that accurate. Take crows for example and other

Corvids like Jays and magpies. Many Corvids have a relatively large brains for

their body size and can do amazing things.

Honors Mueller, an evolutionary biologist at the French National Science Research Council.

So this bird brain expression is a little bit simplified.

Some birds are actually so intelligent that they're informally referred to as primates with feathers.

But even among the smartest bird species, there is still natural variation in brain size, which is a big deal when it comes to being hunted.

Mueller worked with a taxidermy shop in Denmark, which had data on nearly 4,000 birds brought in to be stuffed since 1960.

A lot of the birds were just found dead. They hit a window or a wire, and people picked them up.

But 300 of the specimens had been hunted. So Mueller's team

then compared the brain sizes of birds that got shot to those that didn't. They controlled

for the birds age, sex, body size, and species, and they found

that the hunted specimens brains were actually 5% smaller on average than the brains of birds

that died by other means.

The surprising thing is that if you make the similar kinds of analysis of liver size or heart size,

there is absolutely no difference there.

So this is specific to the brain. The results are in the journal

biology letters. The researchers assume that individuals with larger brains had what

they called, quote, superior escape ability.

That is, they were better at not getting shot.

As game season begins, Mueller has this observation for hunters.

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