Birds are wild. Found a chickadee fledgling in the road earlier this year and nursed him for a couple days before we found a legitimate rehab. Little guy would just hop out of his box, perch on your finger, and sing as loud as he could until you fed him scrambled eggs. Really got me thinking about how special birds are. We have a hummingbird that visits and he'll do stuff like fly into the garage if the door is open, hover and stare at you for 1-2 seconds, and then take off. It's happened so many times I've stopped being startled by the sudden brrrr noise you hear from their wings flapping (they're so fast they can show up in the blink of an eye).

The bumblebees do something similar (I've oddly nursed three different bees with sugar water—all just happened to be in my field of vision crawling around on the ground but not flying). Now you get a bumble or two per day checking in with a quick hover and bob kind of movement before shooting off into the distance.

Does anyone know of any research into this or books identifying behavior like this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sqnxlzLakU

This is more about beehaiviour research and playing with your balls, but the basic idea seems to be that even "small" brains do the same stuff the big brains do - like forming relationships, playing for fun, using tools, etc.

You will like reading Niko Tinbergen's Curious Naturalists

Crows are somewhat unique as an animal in that they've got the ability to pass information off to other members of the flock, and to continue passing information down through generations as necessary. The bird saved in this story, if it has offspring, will likely teach them that she is a safe and beloved human. At the very least, there's lots of research into this topic. I can't speak to the others, sorry.

> Does anyone know of any research into this or books identifying behavior like this?

"Ethology" is the study of the behaviour of non-human animals - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethology (see "References" for books).

An old soviet-era book, Science for Everyone: Ethology, What Animals Do and Why? is a great read on this - https://mirtitles.org/2013/10/08/science-for-everyone-etholo... I had read this when i was young and it has always stayed with me. It gives a nice overview of the domain and is highly recommended.

As a child we had a duck that would come nest in our garden for many years, it was really quite friendly, and would come up the patio doors every morning to beg for some food, didn't seem to be afraid of us. She would have her little ducklings follow her around the garden until they eventually went off to some lake not too far away.

Our cats were absolutely terrified of it.

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