Colorful and intelligent, parrots are prized for their personalities and fascinating ability to talk. Native to tropical and subtropical regions, parrots are social and interactive with their humans and might be smarter than you think.
Although small when compared to intelligent mammals such as apes, elephants and dolphins, a parrot’s brain is highly developed and efficient. Flight navigation, language, social relationships, problem-solving and adaptability are abilities that all parrots possess within their small-but-powerful avian brain.
Some birds—crows, parrots, and jays—possess problem-solving skills that rival those of 
mammals. Crows demonstrate impressive memory for details, even remembering for years the faces of people that annoy them. Does this represent true cognitive ability? Some birds can improvise tools—by bending a piece of wire, for instance—to get the food they want. Are they actually reasoning or just associating each step with coming closer to the goal? Are birds able to get a picture in their minds of what they want to accomplish and then reason out the steps, or are simpler stepwise “associative learning” processes involved?
The field of “bird cognition” really took flight after a 2004 study discovered that birds have a more complex forebrain than previously thought. This “provided the neural evidence” to convince skeptics that birds were doing more than mimicking, responding to stimuli, and associating their actions with desired results.
Some scientists consider super-smart birds products of convergent evolution. They think the evolutionary explanation for bird intelligence would shed light on human evolution. Comparative psychologists Nicola Clayton and Nathan Emery, highlighting the analogy to human and primate evolution from ape-like ancestors, have even dubbed crows “feathered apes.”
Some who maintain super-smart birds really do think about their problems believe birds evolved bright brains through the same mechanism to which they attribute primate and human intelligence. After all, evolutionists seek an evolutionary explanation for everything, and since birds and people in their view are on different branches of the evolutionary tree, they presume similar mental abilities were driven to evolve through similar mechanisms, such as social interaction.
