A long time ago, ancient people used different birds to metaphor people's ambition and wisdom. The first chapter of "Zhuangzi" "Xiaoyaoyou" mentioned that "Jiu cannot understand why Peng flew ninety thousand miles to migrate to Nanming", which is a metaphor for the difference in lofty ambition and wisdom between different people (the difference between Jiu and Peng). A similar metaphor is "the sparrow knows the ambition of the swan", which is enough to show some of the ancient people's understanding of birds. In addition, there are some birds' wisdom that we are familiar with, such as the story of crows drinking water.

Here, I want to tell you how smart birds can be based on my personal experience. During my master's degree, I came into contact with and studied many urban birds. Among them, the intelligence of the blackbird shocked me. Other partners in the research team and I set up a bird net around a blackbird nest, preparing to capture the parent birds of this nest and collect blood samples for paternity testing of them and the nestlings (about extramarital affairs of blackbirds) behavioral research). On the first day, the parent bird started struggling after hitting the bird net. I quickly rushed towards it, but it managed to escape. The next day we decided to "fight again"! On our way to set up a bird net around the blackbird nest, when we were still 10 meters away from the nest, the parent bird took the lead in attacking again. It recognized me and hit me directly on the head. Launched a "biochemical attack" (sprayed feces at me).

This incident raised my understanding of the intelligence of blackbirds to a "notch", and I deeply realized: It's possible that we underestimate the intelligence of birds.