End of Week 3

This week, we read Safina’s Beyond Worlds, and annotated some of the chapters. I chose the chapter “Trumpets of Elephants.” I found elephant behavior to be very interesting. The ones that stuck with me the most after doing the annotations was a sections titled “The Big Question.” Cythnia Moss was at the Amboseli field camp observing elephants. Her big question was about how a lifetime of watching elephants taught her about humanity, and how elephants should not be compared to humans.

I am still not sure on a possible research topic, but I am leaning towards birds and intelligence. I found the Bird Brain documentary to be very interesting. My ideas have changed a bit since the last week. At first, I wanted to do elephants and communication, but birds and intelligence have more articles related to them on Google Scholar, and I think it will be a bit easier.

My research process this week was to look for the big umbrella topic, and I chose cognition, intelligence. I then followed the Week 3 Research Advice Guide. The most helpful was asking myself the research questions. This helped me research more efficient. Some scientists I learned about were Auguste Von Bayern and Nathan Emery. Von Bayern had wrote many research articles on birds and Emery wrote the science book, “Bird Brain.” Keywords that I have been collecting that seem to be the most promising for future research are “avian intelligence” and “bird brain size.” Some internet sources that I consulted were Google Scholar, Research Gate, and Twitter to find out more about the researchers. The best source I found this week was, “Cognitive adaptations of social bonding in birds,” by Emery. This article focused on how birds could be more intellectually to apes, as seen by social interaction.