Evidence of clever birds just keep popping up. A report in the journal Nature shows that scrub-jays can plan for the future, storing food types in places where they know it will not be available the next day. From news@nature:

The birds were put in cages that were divided into three parts. In the evening they were kept in the middle section, and fed powdered pine nuts that they couldn't store. In the morning, they were kept either in the 'breakfast room', where they were given food, or went hungry in the 'no-breakfast room'.

After getting used to this set-up, the jays were given whole pine nuts in the evening, which they could bury in trays of sand. The jays put three times as many in the no-breakfast room than in the breakfast room, so that they wouldn't go hungry in the morning.

In another experiment, the jays got breakfast in both rooms. However, their breakfast comprised whole peanuts in one room, and dried dog food in the other. When given both foods in the evening, the birds stored each food in the room where it would be lacking the next morning.

These results have great implications for the way we see the intelligence of birds:

No other animals outside humans have been shown able to plan actions based on how they will feel in the future, says [researcher Nicola] Clayton. "The jays constantly surprise me," she says. "They keep doing all these clever things." …

Others agree that the cognitive abilities of birds may be under-rated. "It's not a surprise to me," says Thomas Zentall of the University of Kentucky in Lexington, who studies cognition in animals. "There's been a bias against birds because they have small brains."

The bias is misplaced, he argues. Many birds lead intellectually demanding lives - finding and processing different types of food, remembering where they hid food and keeping track of their neighbours. And, Clayton points out, scrub-jays actually have relatively large brains: "Their brains are bigger than chimps, relative to their body size."

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