Today, the use of tools by non-human animals – from primates to cephalopods – is held up as near-undeniable proof of the intelligence and sophistication of animal minds. Biologists have also categorized a handful of birds, including parrots, corvids, and finches, as tool users. Yet this modern plethora of animal tool users is a relatively recent phenomenon. In the nineteenth century, the heyday of natural history, the relationship between animals and tools was understood in a very different way.

In this talk I explore how, in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States, birds were believed to possess natural “tools” in the form of their bills, claws, and talons. These embodied tools were described as chisels, pickaxes, hammers, and needles, which determined what kind of architectural and artistic feats birds were capable of. Bodies and brains were closely linked, with the presence of versatile beaks or claws on a bird indicating the presence of a capable mind.

American ornithologists were also aware that birds could interact with objects in their environment in novel ways, with seabirds dropping shellfish to crack them open and crows sitting on ant nests to allow the insects to remove parasites from their feathers. For some, these behaviors suggested that birds possessed a kind of rudimentary intelligence and could understand cause-and-effect.

What would today be regarded as genuine examples of avian tool use, however, did not rouse excitement. When the California Academy of Sciences launched an expedition to the Galapagos Islands in the early years of the twentieth century, several American ornithologists would encounter stick-wielding fiches. Yet in a world where many birds possessed embodied tools or were known to interact with objects in their environment in a sophisticated way, the use of stick tools was not necessarily indicative of extraordinary intelligence. The Galapagos finches attracted little scientific interest.