16 April 2025
Nine years ago two studies of rock pigeon (Columba livia) brain power discovered that pigeons can tell the difference between a real 4-letter English word and a nonsense collection of four letters.
In the experiment, pigeons were trained to peck four-letter English words as they came up on a screen, or to instead peck a symbol when a four-letter non-word was displayed.…
Eventually the four birds in the experiment recognized 26 to 58 real words and correctly labelled over 8,000 as non-words.
— Science Daily, Sept 2016: Bird brain? Pigeons have quite a way with words
Though they know a real 4-letter word when they see one, they don’t know what it means, so they can’t tell the difference between a good 4-letter word and a bad one.
If pigeons could speak they’d have fowl mouths.