I was just reading something that confirmed what many of intuit: birds are quite surprisingly smart relative to their size. Apparently it comes down to neuron count, as opposed to brain size, as such. Thus your average crow has the same number of cortical neurons as your average monkey, and that’s why crows seem as smart as monkeys, despite their much smaller brains. They pack a lot more neurons into that smaller head volume. And it explains why elephants are NOT smarter, too: they have fewer cortical neurons than the crow, despite extremely large brains.
My mother likes the birds that dwell around her house (and make quite a bit of noise, too). Here are some pictures she gave to me of her various neighbors.
A tawny frogmouth.
A pair of bush thickknees.
A king parrot.
