Definitions and Features
It may seem counterintuitive to have to begin by talking about feet when the subject is cognition. However, the question of what passerines are has been determined by taxonomists, who classified birds with three unwebbed toes facing forward and one toe facing backward as passerines, or perching birds. With a few notable exceptions, most birds have four toes, but some have vestigial toes and effectively live with two or three toes; quite a few have two facing forward and two backward, but birds of the particular group known as “passerines” have three toes facing forward (called an anisodactyl foot), meant to promote perching.
Beak shape is not a good way to identify passerines. Beak shapes vary widely from short compact beaks as in finches to straight all-purpose beak as in flycatchers, sometimes massive beaks as in ravens to delicate and sometimes curved beaks of the honeyeaters.
To complicate matters, the labels “passerines” and “songbirds” have, at times,...
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Kaplan, G. (2022). Passerine Cognition. In: Vonk, J., Shackelford, T.K. (eds) Encyclopedia of Animal Cognition and Behavior. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55065-7_875
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