Full Transcript for Louis Lefebvre

London, whatever. And they asked me, Louis, what is the dumbest bird in the world? And I said, the emu, and among all these British journalists, there was only one that was not British. He was Australian. And so they all turned to him and smirked. And obviously they were sort of porting it on this poor Australian journalist that I had just named the national bird in Australia as the dumbest bird in the world. And obviously that made the headlines. And I did a radio show on CBC at that time in which I was asked this question. And they actually had someone that came on and said, yes, I think emus are very dumb. Because this person said, apparently, what the aboriginals say is that if you lie on your back on the ground and lift your foot pointing at 90 degrees, an emu will come around to check out if you're an emu. 00:07:06 Speaker 1: I don't believe that. 00:07:08 Speaker 2: It was like, it's a nice story. Anyways, made me laugh. It made me laugh. So I sincerely apologize. I sincerely apologize. 00:07:19 Speaker 1: What makes the emu or the ostrich so dumb? 00:07:22 Speaker 2: Well, actually, there are many different lines of evidence. The first thing what you could do is look at the number of neurons in the part of their brain that corresponds to our cortex. And in birds, you'd call this the pallium. And so when you count these neurons, there's a team in Prague that does this counting of neurons in bird brains. And if you look at the number of neurons per sort of kilogram of body weight, you've got a pretty big bird there. And you've got very few neurons in the equivalent of the cortex of that pretty big bird. So it means that it's not running on a terribly large computer for the size of its body. The second thing is you can count the number of unusual intelligent neurons novel behaviors in the measurement that I've invented, this IQ measure, and the emus end up having either maybe one or zero and the South African ostrich has zero. Then you can give them problems to solve. Usually the problem is how can you get to food that has an obstacle in front of it? So the test that was done with emus and ostriches is access food behind a plastic partition And you have to rotate the partition to reach a hole that then allows you to get to the food. And the emus did it. All three emus that were tested succeeded in that test. 00:08:50 Speaker 1: There you go. 00:08:51 Speaker 2: I know, I know. But the South African ostrich failed. So that's how we know. And in terms of innovations, I can't remember which one, but I think the emus are slightly ahead of the ostrich. 00:09:04 Speaker 1: Well, apart from those tests, is there anything in their actual behavior that indicates that they're dumb? 00:09:09 Speaker 2: Well, my specialty is finding a measure that I can quantify and then compare it to all sorts of other measures. So there are many ways in which you can measure intelligence. You can give animals problems. My measure is how often do they innovate? How often do they find a new way or a new technique or a new food? And that doesn't happen very often in emus or ostriches. And emus and ostriches are pretty big, so they're pretty easy to see. So, I mean, your tiny little 10-gram bird that's hiding in the bushes might be very difficult to see by a birdwatcher or an ornithologist, but an emu and an ostrich are pretty big. And the research effort, which is also something I measure, which is how many studies are done on a particular species, that's large enough that we can have pretty good confidence that when you don't see anything reported, it's because there's nothing there. 00:10:08 Speaker 1: My guest on Conversations today is Emeritus Professor Dr. Louis Lefevre from Montreal, living currently on the border between the US and Canada. And his book is called A Bird's IQ. It's really interesting. Back after the break. Welcome back to Conversations, everybody. We're chatting with emeritus professor, Dr. Louis Lefebvre, who's a gentleman from Canada. And he's a behavioral psychologist of animals, if that makes sense to you. Louis might be able to explain that a bit. He studies animal behavior, but he's written a book called A Bird's IQ. And in it, I'll ask him, not immediately, but in it, he He almost posits that maybe as evolution progresses, maybe birds will take over the world as we took over the world from dinosaurs. But let's talk about that a bit later. Louis, you're an animal behaviouralist. Can you tell us a bit about your early days? I mean, did you grow up in Montreal? 00:11:07 Speaker 2: Yes, I grew up in Montreal. I've never been much of a nature person. And actually, I was more comfortable in the city. So the first research I started to do when I was hired at McGill and wanted to do field work was with the pigeons in the city of Montreal. So that was how wild I thought I could go. Then I learned, amazingly enough, because you know it's minus 25 degrees in winter in Montreal, and I learned that Miguel had a field station in the West Indies in Barbados, where it's 28 degrees all the time, plus 28 in the Canadian winter. And so I started a program of research down there, And the birds happen to be so fantastic, so innovative, because there's very few species there. And the whole island has been transformed by tourism and sugar cane and urbanization. So the birds are more or less forced to do things, new things. They invent new things constantly. And there's practically no predation there. And they're very tame. So it's very easy to start finding all sorts of interesting behaviors that they do. And that's how I came up with the idea that novelty is a measure that we can use to quantify intelligence in birds. And colleagues in England then applied my method to primates. And that became very popular because people in science are very open to the idea that primates are very intelligent. And by measuring the rate of innovation in different species, they were able to show Not surprisingly, the

chimpanzees have the highest rate of innovation, which doesn't surprise anyone. But macaques and capuchin monkeys from South America are also very high on that list. And capuchins have been separated from other monkeys of the old world for about 35 million years. So as I was saying about your curwongs and your Australian magpies and your butcher birds that are... have been for millions of years separate from your crows and your ravens, innovation and intelligence evolves independently in several different groups of animals that have basically only a relationship to an ancestor that's 25, 35 million years ago. And that's the interesting thing. Not only is intelligence not just something that we have and something that birds and primates have, But different lines of birds and different lines of primates also have this innovative, intelligent behavior. 00:13:45 Speaker 1: Come back to birds. But I did read where you worked with chimpanzees for a little while. You described trying to put a nappy on a chimpanzee. What sort of research were you doing there? 00:13:58 Speaker 2: I was working for a while in a lab that had baby chimpanzees that they were studying the development of intelligence. So there's this scale that was invented by a Swiss researcher called Jean Piaget, in which you watch how intelligence develops in a baby over the years and how it becomes more and more sophisticated as the child grows. And there's a scale. You'd go from one step to another to one step. And they were trying to see where chimpanzees fit on that scale. And I was sort of helping out. I also did research on my own with the chimps. And it was one of the most fantastic experiences in my life. And we were raising them as if they were babies. So when I finally had two sons, I was able to change diapers very, very, very easily because I had learned with baby chimps. And unfortunately, you can't just go to the drugstore and get pamper type nappies for chimpanzees because they don't have them. They have them only for babies. And babies tend to have these round little bottoms. And they're not full of hair around the round little bottoms. And they don't have prehensile feet. Chimpanzees have prehensile hands. They can grab things with their hands, but they can also grab things with their feet. And the hair just doesn't stick when you put the little sticky part of the nappy. And so the bum of the chimpanzee doesn't have the right shape to fit into the human nappy. The hair... prevents the sticky part from sticking, and they can rip off the nappy if they want with their foot while you're trying to change it. So when I finally came to human babies, it was a dream. 00:15:43 Speaker 1: That's a whole different thread of discussion because I know we want to talk about your book, about the bird's IQ, but chimpanzees raised in that environment, how sophisticated and intelligent and domesticated can they be? 00:16:00 Speaker 2: Some people that work with chimpanzees that are around humans think that what humans can do is to bring out some forms of intelligence that chimpanzees don't really use among themselves in the wild, but that they can use around humans. If, for instance, you train them with language. The chimpanzees in Montreal were not trained to use language, but there's research on chimpanzees in which they're taught either sign language or language using a computer with symbols and are able to manipulate these symbols on a computer to be able to answer questions. There's an American researcher also in the US that raised a parrot called Alex in a way that she could ask questions to the parrot with language, with human language. So the parrot was talking to this researcher and she was able to say, for instance, ask a question directly which we never can do when we're studying uh normal intelligence in in other animals but in the case of chimps and that particular gray parrot alex you're able to use words to see how intelligent works how intelligence works in them. 00:17:12 Speaker 1: Well i guess we've all had budgies that you can teach to talk and maybe even magpie you can teach budgies to talk incredibly um This is an aside, but when I was a kid, we had a little budgie called Bobby and we taught it our address, 68A Moseley Street, Glenelg. And my brother walked outside with a budgie on his head and it flew away. And half an hour later, a policeman walked up the driveway with the budgie on its finger because the budgie had told him our address, 68A Moseley Street, Glenelg. It was the most amazing thing. But look, getting back to the ethics of that, what happens to the chimpanzee when they mature? 00:17:57 Speaker 2: Well, they were sent out to a zoo and they lived in a zoo for a while. And after that, they went to a place that takes care of aging chimpanzees. And of the four chimpanzees that I worked with at the time, I think there's only one that's still alive. And they're like in a retirement home for aging chimpanzees. 00:18:19 Speaker 1: So it was a good life for them? 00:18:21 Speaker 2: I knew them basically. I was close to them when they were babies. And so up to, say, the age of two and two or three. So at that age, they are very much dependent on adults and they're very cuddly. And you develop this relationship with them that's very intense. You know, you feel like a parent and they treat you like a parent. And it was very rewarding for me. And it also gave me an insight into one form of intelligence. I was able to do an experiment with one of the females in which we were exchanging different items of food that have different value. And I was able to see that when we exchanged foods of different values, the female I was working with, which is called Sophie, was extraordinarily good at getting as much out of the exchange as she could, even to the point of cheating. Really? 00:19:16 Speaker 1: Yes. 00:19:18 Speaker 2: I would, for instance, give her something she really liked and then request she give it

back in exchange for something I would give her. And if it was something that was pretty worthless to her, she would just look away and say, this guy's crazy. I will not give you back for this thing you're offering. But when she was in a position where she had something really, really good and I offered her something really, really good, what she would do is not refuse the exchange, but she would actually eat almost everything of what she had, and then exchange the tiniest, tiniest little bit. And at the end, she would even exchange saliva. She would eat the item that she was supposed to give back to me and she would swallow it and have just a tiny bit of saliva left with a little, little tiny piece. And she would give me that in exchange for the new food. She was a very thorough, very good exchanger. 00:20:12 Speaker 1: My guest is Emeritus Professor Louis Lefevre from Montreal. We're going to talk about birds. We'll get off the chimpanzees. His book is called A Bird's IQ. Back after the break, folks. Welcome back to Conversations, everybody. My guest today is Emeritus Professor Louis Lefevre from Canada, McGill University in Montreal, who studies animal behavior, more specifically his been fascinated by birds birds behavior and he's written a book called a bird's iq and in which he basically rates how smart birds are crows are one of the smartest for the crow supporters out there and emus and ostriches are at the bottom of the scale louis tell us about your early days mum and dad and what piqued your interest in animal behavior I. 00:21:01 Speaker 2: Was a student in psychology and like many students that apply to psychology, I thought psychology would help me cure my own neuroses as a teenager. And I went into the psychology courses and I wasn't terribly convinced that there was something extraordinarily interesting there. And then a professor came and gave us a lecture about ethology, which was animal behavior done in the natural world. And psychologists tend to study animals. They study lab rats and pigeons and boxes in which they do learning experiments and everything. And I really didn't like that, you know, being in a white lab coat and having, you know, the smell of rat dung around the cages and everything. And then this guy came and we saw that you could do animal behavior by walking on the beaches and the dunes of the Netherlands. There was a famous Dutch ethologist called Nico Tinbergen who was doing research on gulls on the dunes and the beaches of the Netherlands. And I saw that and I said, wow, I like walking on beaches. This is what I want to do in life. And I was lucky enough to having done a PhD on the same topic that a professor in England at Oxford had been working on. And his name was Richard Dawkins. who is quite famous in biology because he wrote a book called The Selfish Gene. He's also a militant atheist and wrote a book called The God Delusion. In any case, he was a student of Nico Tinbergen. And the first day I arrived

in Oxford for my postdoc, I actually met Nico Tinbergen. And when I came home that evening, I refused to wash my hands. for three days, the hand of Nico Tinbergen, my hero. Nico Tinbergen won a Nobel Prize in 1973. And that more or less gave animal behavior, ethology, animal behavior studied in the wild rather than the lab, more or less its sort of star status. And that's what I had wanted to do since then. 00:23:11 Speaker 1: Did your parents foster that sort of interest? 00:23:16 Speaker 2: No, no, there was absolutely no nature or anything. I was more or less the kind of kid that read everything. So I could have been a historian. In fact, I wrote novels. I wrote historical novels also. I've published four novels in addition to the work I've done in biology. And three of those novels are historical. 00:23:38 Speaker 1: So I like history. 00:23:39 Speaker 2: I like anthropology. It could have been just anything that puts me in contact with books. And in fact, the measure that I've invented, which is called innovation rate, makes me read ornithology journals. So instead of being in the field, which I also do, you just go to the library and you just read paper after paper after paper until you find those papers that tell the story of, hey, I saw this bird doing this amazing new thing. And I put this in my database, but it involves reading journals. 00:24:12 Speaker 1: Are you a bird watcher? I mean, it's a passion of some people. 00:24:19 Speaker 2: I know, I know. No, I'm not very good at it. I'm terrible at it. People that know North American birds know that there's a bird here that's called a chickadee and one that's called a nuthatch. And the only way I can tell the two apart is because the nuthatch is upside down on a tree trunk and the chickadee is right side up. 00:24:40 Speaker 1: Upside down or they just hang up? 00:24:42 Speaker 2: No, the head is down. So they sort of hang by their feet onto the bark and for some reason they do it head down. 00:24:52 Speaker 1: Interesting theory you have. When you go back to prehistoric times, you're talking about the crow and you're talking about, I can't say Homo sapiens because we hadn't arrived, but You're suggesting it's just a fluke of evolution that humans developed to the stage we are, and the crow didn't. Can you explore that philosophy or that concept a bit more for us? 00:25:18 Speaker 2: I think you can make science interesting to people by writing about facts, but you could also imagine a little bit. So right now, all the other great apes besides us are doing really, really poorly All of the great apes are really, really threatened by extinction. The populations are decreasing. Chimps, orangutans, gorillas, whatever, bonobos, and even the gibbons and the siamangs, which are cousins also to our family, are doing really, really poorly. We are the only ape species that's not on the verge of extinction. The family of crows has several species, and they're all doing pretty well, except one, which is the Hawaiian crow. which is practically extinct. But all other crows are doing really well. So imagine what happens in a thousand years. Imagine what happens in 5,000 years, 10,000 years. We're not doing really well because we're endangering our environment. The planet is sick and we're making it sicker every year. I mean, you people in Australia are facing temperatures that you've probably never faced during your summer and the dangers from wildfires and everything else. And the Great Barrier Reef is declining. So what if we go extinct? Who's going to remain? The crows and the ravens are going to make it through the extinction of all the apes. Now, go back six, seven million years ago. Six, seven million years ago, we are grouped the species that became us. were not separate yet from the ancestors of chimpanzees. We were still with that common ancestor. We diverged from chimpanzees about six million years ago. If someone from another planet, a scientist from another planet, came down six million years ago and looked at the monkey that would eventually become us in six million years, and looked at the crows and ravens, And the crows and ravens were really diversifying and were really doing what crows and ravens do six, seven million years ago. Could that scientist from another planet have guessed that it would be the descendant of the monkey that would evolve the kind of intelligence we have? Or could it have been the descendant of the crow or the raven six million years down the line? I'm not sure if there had been several scientists on that spaceship and they had placed bets, perhaps the bets would have been on the raven and not the monkey. 00:28:03 Speaker 1: That's an amazing concept. 00:28:07 Speaker 2: Which might also be the case in 10,000 years. In 10,000 years, that very, very old scientist will come back to our planet and say to the others who bet on the monkey, ha, told you so, it's the ravens. 00:28:25 Speaker 1: It's a pretty scary concept. We all worry about the planet, but are we in that much danger? Are we an endangered species? 00:28:34 Speaker 2: There have been up to nine species of hominins at a certain time, and there's only one left, us. We're all over the world, but all the other species are gone. The other apes are on the way out, unless we try to change things very, very severely. 00:28:56 Speaker 1: Is that because of their environment is being deteriorated? 00:29:01 Speaker 2: For all sorts of reasons. They can catch diseases from us. The environment's deteriorating, yes, and the populations are decreasing. And at a certain point when the population becomes very small, the gene pool becomes less diversified and the whole population might be in danger. In any case, I'm saying this from the point of view of an evolutionary biologist. So an evolutionary biologist is just looking at what survives, what goes extinct, and basically not making any judgment about it. A conservation ecologist. makes judgments about

survival and extinction. But an evolutionary biologist just looks at what happened, who went through, and who hit the wall of extinction. And it's those two stories that I tell when I ask people to think about what might have happened six million years ago and what might happen in 10,000 years. 00:30:04 Speaker 1: Emeritus Professor Louis Lefebvre is my guest, folks. His book is called A Bird's IQ. It's so many interesting concepts in it, so many interesting studies that he's looked at. Back after the break. My guest on Conversations is Emeritus Professor from McGill University in Montreal, Louis Lefebvre, and he studies animal behavior, but he's fascinated with birds that The book is called A Bird's IQ. You talk about some really interesting birds and things that they do. The bird with the biggest brain is the New Zealand Kea. 00:30:37 Speaker 2: No, some parrots have larger brains. The Ara, which is a South American parrot, has a larger brain and many, many more neurons than a Kea. But Keas do more interesting things. 00:30:49 Speaker 1: Give us an example of what they do. 00:30:52 Speaker 2: People brought... rabbits to New Zealand. And they eventually found out that that's not a good idea because the rabbits are eating everything that you don't want them to eat. And then eventually they brought in stoats. 00:31:06 Speaker 1: Like ferrets. 00:31:06 Speaker 2: And heat ferrets, yeah, to hunt the rabbits. And then the stoats became a problem because many animals in New Zealand had never had predators in the millions of years that they've evolved over there because New Zealand is a couple of islands. So the stoats became a problem. So then people said, let's bring in a new predator for the stoats. And then other people said, are you crazy? By bringing in predators, we've already created the problem. Let's trap the stoats. So they started trapping the stoats and they put traps out in which they had eggs inside the trap and that would attract the stoat. And eventually what they found is that all the traps had been sprung and the eggs had been eaten. And so they had to put cameras to see if the stoats had figured out how to get the food without getting into the traps. And they realized that it was kias that were doing it. And then there was like a war between the stoat catchers and the kias to see how can we make a trap that the kias cannot enter. And the kias saying, okay, buddy, we'll match your wits and I will find a way to get through. And eventually they started using They started using sticks to get the trap to spring and to get the eggs. And eventually when they started putting wire mesh on the traps so they couldn't be sprung, the Kias took the wire mesh and broke the wire mesh to use that as a tool in order to get to the food. And I think finally the most recent news is that the humans are winning the fight and the Kias are not able to get into the stoke traps for the moment. 00:32:49 Speaker 1: Why didn't they get caught like the stoats? 00:32:55 Speaker 2: Oh, they were not going into the trap. They were springing it from the outside and getting the egg from the outside with sticks. 00:33:02 Speaker 1: Do you have a favorite bird? 00:33:06 Speaker 2: The birds that I have worked with in Barbados, I have one, it's called the Barbados bullfinch. It's a tiny, tiny little, it looks like a sparrow. In fact, the Bajans, the Barbadians call it a sparrow. instead of a bullfinch. And it looks like a English sparrow, which you would have in Australia. And similar to the sparrows that are in Australia and New Zealand, they actually go to terraces of restaurants and they pick up sugar packets and they open the sugar packets to get at the sugar with their beaks. There's a study in New Zealand about sparrows that have been imported from England via Australia. And they open sugar packets on cafe terraces. And the bullfinches do the same thing in Barbados. So they're extremely innovative. And when we give them problems, they're very, very good at solving the problems. And the nice thing is that they have a cousin species called the black-faced grass quit, which lives in the same environment, has the same social life, which is territorial, but it's extremely conservative. It just eats grass seed. And if you put any new food out, the grass quit doesn't even notice and doesn't care. And the bullfinch comes in right away. And when you test the two in problems, you find that the grass quit is really, really bad at solving a problem. And the bullfinch is really, really, really good. And I've had a PhD student who was very good at molecular genetics. And he was able to go into the neurons of these two species of birds and found that there's a receptor at the synapses, the junction of the neurons that is excitatory in the bullfinch and inhibits transmission between neurons in the grass quit. And that was a fantastic study because what it shows is that natural selection can act on problem solving and opportunism in birds by modifying the genes that make up the proteins at the meeting point of two synapses, in one case preventing the connection and in another case facilitating the connection. That was really fantastic. 00:35:30 Speaker 1: You talk about lots of other things, you know, like how birds store food. Can you give us some of those more common examples of behaviour that seems far too intelligent? 00:35:43 Speaker 2: Yeah, well, that's a pretty good debate going on in the field of animal intelligence, because the question is, is there one intelligence that deals with many kinds of problems? Or are there many kinds of intelligences that specifically deal with one problem and not other problems? So these birds that store food, what they do is when winter comes, they find food and they hide that food. And there are birds that do this in Europe. There are birds that do this in North America. And they have to remember where they put food because their survival over winter depends on the memory of that

particular food. And what people found is that there's a specific part of the brain called the hippocampus that deals with the memory of where you put something. So in us, it's the same thing. When you're looking for where you parked your car, if you can't remember where you parked your car half hour ago, it's your hippocampus that's doing the work. You are rummaging through your hippocampus trying to find your car. And it's the same thing for a bird that's trying to remember where it put the food that it cached. And it's very specific. And those birds that are extraordinary at this, so some birds can hide up to 10,000 different food items and remember the place where they hid those items for six months. And that's fantastic. But it doesn't transfer to other kinds of intelligence. 00:37:09 Speaker 1: It's specific. 00:37:11 Speaker 2: To spatial memory. So they're what they call modules in the brain that deals with specific problems. 00:37:19 Speaker 1: You write about a chicken playing tic-tac-toe. Now, we call it noughts and crosses. A chicken that can beat adults playing noughts and crosses. Surely that's just by accident. 00:37:32 Speaker 2: They just train the chicken to do that. So I don't know if you play tic-tac-toe, whatever you call it there, but. 00:37:40 Speaker 1: There's a strategy. 00:37:42 Speaker 2: So the first person that plays, there's a strategy. If you fill the different corners and then one of the diagonals, you cannot lose. The opponent, the most it can do is tie. So all you have to do is train the chicken. to do those moves where it cannot lose. 00:38:00 Speaker 1: It's hard trying. And it works. 00:38:04 Speaker 2: You're just rewarded for pecking at this particular place. So I didn't know that strategy. I never played exacto. And I didn't know the winning strategy. So I played against the chicken and I lost against the chicken because the chicken played the optimal strategy where you can never lose. And I didn't know it, so I lost against the chicken. And I find it particularly rewarding to be sort of having spent my career studying the intelligence of birds and get beaten by a chicken at tic-tac-toe. 00:38:40 Speaker 1: It's totally different, but it's always intrigued me. And you studied urban pigeons, but the homing capability of pigeons, do you have a theory or an understanding of that? How on earth do they get home? 00:38:53 Speaker 2: First of all, you have to train them. If you bring a pigeon a thousand kilometers away from its roost, it won't be able to go back home. So you have to train it to increasing distances. And the pigeons are sensitive to all sorts of cues. They can sense the magnetic fields, which is something that they're very good at. They can know the position of the sun, whether the sun indicates west or east, depending on the time of day. And so if you switch the circadian clock of a pigeon and make it think that morning is night, it'll make a mistake. based on the position of the sun because if the sun is in the morning and it thinks that it's night it'll interpret the position of the sun as being west instead of east and maybe in australia. 00:39:42 Speaker 1: Everything so they're sensitive to magnetic fields. 00:39:45 Speaker 2: Magnetic fields position of the sun some pigeons even use smell to go back if there's cues that are available for that. So it's more or less a question of using cues that we're not very sensitive to. And also there's an element of memorizing there, where they memorize the position of the spatial elements close to home. So when they get within a few kilometers of home, they know the position of the roost based on the map that they have of all the buildings around the roost. 00:40:20 Speaker 1: Okay, we're coming to the end, and there's so much more that we could have talked about, but do you have a very favorite story or your most favorite bird? 00:40:29 Speaker 2: There's a bird in India called a treepi, and what it does is it goes into Hindu temples, and the people in the temples make little votive candles made out of clarified butter and pure cotton wicks, and they light those, and the treepi goes into the temple. takes the little votive cup, brings it outside the temple, shakes the lit wick, extinguishes the fire, and eats up the cotton that is deliciously basting in clarified butter. And it gets a full meal. It even gets the fibers that we're told we have to eat with our meals in the guise of the cotton wick. 00:41:16 Speaker 1: Why is that your favorite? 00:41:18 Speaker 2: Because I think it's so cool. You've got fire. You've got them going into the temple. You've got them bringing the little cup outside the temple. They extinguish the wick. That's, to me, what's the fantastic thing. 00:41:33 Speaker 1: Well, it's a really interesting book. It's a bit scary. The epilogue says, Imagine our Earth in the distant future, 5,000,000, 5,000,000, even just 500 years from now. If the current trend continues, our ape relatives, chimpanzees, bonobos i don't know what a bonobo is actually gorillas orangutans will all be extinct and if we go on as we are doing exploiting and changing our environment at the same breakneck pace as today homo sapiens too may well have gone the way of the dodo but the crow will still survive louis thank you so much for your time. 00:42:08 Speaker 2: Thank you this was fun. 00:42:10 Speaker 1: Emeritus professor louis lefebvre was um And my guest, his book is called A Bird's IQ, Innovation, Intelligence and Problem Solving in the Avian World. Thank you so much for joining us.