Reddit reviews Gifts of the Crow: How Perception, Emotion, and Thought Allow Smart Birds to Behave Like Humans

Yes. They do. If you want some good resources that get sciency with it:


Alex & Me: How a Scientist and a Parrot Discovered a Hidden World of Animal Intelligence--and Formed a Deep Bond in the Process: Dr. Irene Pepperberg's studies on language and cognitive theory with African Greys. Alex could do complex abstract conversions with things like number and counting, for instance he knew what "5" is as a symbol and could equate it to a representation for a number of objects like x, x, x, x, x means there are "five" "x"s. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXoTaZotdHg


Conversations with Cosmo: At Home with an African Grey Parrot University of Georgia PHD who shares her life with her CAG, and has created a language for conversing with him she calls "Cosmish" which incluses tenses (future, past, future possible, etc.) and an number of other advanced linguistic constructs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyWYzuV6WYk


Gifts of the Crow: How Perception, Emotion, and Thought Allow Smart Birds to Behave Like Humans: A fascinating and highly entertaining book about cognition in corvid populations. I HIGHLY RECOMMEND THE AUDIOBOOK if you've got a 6-hour road trip, it is GREAT.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0OAWFn02Lg


I've seen my birds pick up spontaneous conversational associations. The original Dr. Doolittle was fabled to "talk with animals" because he kept an African Grey and for grey owners, it's just accepted as "the norm" and taken for granted. It wasn't until I got Ollie, my "new" bird after losing "Smokey" the bird I'd had for most of my life that I saw the process develop again.


One striking example was "whoops". The second day Ollie was home, he broke a toe. He temporarily became clumsy as a result, so if I dropped or startled anything near him or he stumbled, I was very careful to say "Whoops, you're all right." Over time, it just became "Whoops". His toe healed and he regained his footing and I'd long since forgotten about it. At about 9 months old, he had his first molt of flight feathers. When I'd gotten him he had a HORRIBLE clipping, so his wings were useless. After his flight feathers came back in and he began fledging, I noticed him using "Whoops" whenever he had a shaky landing.


He was doing this on his own. Additionally, any time anything is dropped in his vicinity, he exclaims "whoops", if he's on me and I do something he's not expected "Whoops". The cat falls off the couch "Whoops". So I'm pretty certain, he knows that there are appropriate contexts for saying "Whoops" and he in those contexts he predictably says "whoops"...


This is one of probably dozens of examples, but, yes, based on both reading and practical experience with greys, I fully believe that they both TALK and cognitively use language.

Thanks for the link, it was very interesting. If you haven't already, I would suggest that you read Gifts of the Crow. Great book on the subject.

The full NOVA episode from 2010, "A Murder of Crows", is free to stream at video.pbs.org.

There was a New York Times article about the UW research in 2008 that explains the research as well.

The UW professor, Dr. John Marzluff, wrote two books on the subject: Gifts of the Crow and In the Company of Crows and Ravens.

Was just looking at Corvidae books, there's also "Gifts of the Crow", haven't read yet but 4.5 stars on Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/Gifts-Crow-Perception-Emotion-Thought/dp/1439198748/

Also Noah Strycker's "The Thing With Feathers" has a good chapter on Clark's Nutcracker memory, also corvids; they can remember thousands of cache locations, allowing them to breed in January in the mountains. That was the only corvid bit I think, but that whole book was good. https://www.amazon.com/Thing-Feathers-Surprising-Lives-Reveal/dp/159463341X/