I remember my brother calling me a "bird-brain" when I was a kid. Simply by looking at the size of a bird's head, I could guess that wasn't a compliment. But I was wrong.

This winter I placed some leftover Christmas peanuts in the birdfeeder.

The blue jays soon discovered them and the peanuts were winged away within 30 minutes.

But it was what happened two months later that got me thinking about birds and their brains. I noticed a blue jay in our backyard, near a walkway edged with a plastic guard. The bird hopped over to the edge of the guard and, after searching for only a few seconds pulled out a peanut! He carried it off, but returned within minutes and pulled out another from the same spot. The jay must have hidden those nuts two months earlier. The fact that the bird retained this memory for 60 days blew my so-called bird-brained mind.

Theodore Barber, author of The Human Nature of Birds: A Scientific Discovery with Startling Implications, says: "I came to the shocking realization that, in many well-conducted investigations, birds had demonstrated awareness and intelligence, and had also shown they have individual, unique personalities which at times remarkably resemble people." He uses Alex, a male African grey parrot as an example. Alex has lived semi-free for 17 years in a scientific lab where he has learned to use more than 100 English words and numbers from one to six. Alex not only solves problems with this knowledge, he creates whole new concepts. "After Alex learned that a triangle is three-cornered and a square is four-cornered, he spontaneously and creatively called a football 'two-corner' and a pentagon 'five-corner'," says Barber.

But it's not only human-trained birds that can solve puzzles or come up with creative ideas. Crows drop walnuts on the street at a busy city intersection, watch the car tires crush the shells, then wait for the "walk" light to safely collect the nuts. Japanese barn swallows hover before an electric eye and open a warehouse door that allows them access to their nesting place. And a blue heron steals bread used to feed ducks to bait fish.

Some people still consider the human mind to be unique, with animals capable of only the simplest mental processes. But Gareth Huw Davies, a British journalist specializing in the environment, wildlife and conservation, says a new generation of scientists believes that creatures, including birds, can solve problems by insight and even learn by example, as human children do.

Birds have learned to create and use tools. Crows use their beaks as scissors and fashion hooks from twigs to forage for seeds, carrying the tool from one feeding location to another. The woodpecker finch, found in the Galapagos Islands, will snap off a twig, trim it to size and use it to pry insects out of bark.

My backyard blue jay showed the astonishing powers of recall of birds that cache food. The Clarke's nutcracker, a type of North American crow, collects up to 30,000 pine seeds over three weeks in November, then carefully buries them for safe keeping across an area of 200 square kilometres. Over the next eight months, it succeeds in retrieving more than 90 per cent of them, even when they are covered in snow. This trait is found in varying degrees in chickadees as well.

Studies have determined that the secret to the amazing memories of food-storers lies near the top of their brains, in the hippocampus. This area is larger than in closely related species that do not store. It is only after a bird has had some practice and experience of hiding and retrieving caches that its hippocampus expands. It is a learned skill.

It has also been determined that crows, ravens and jays that hide seeds in the presence of other birds come back later and hide them in a different place when no other birds are watching. Skill and reasoning combined. Amazing.

So the next time you consider calling someone a bird-brain, remember it's a compliment!